Hello,
I installed NetBSD 1.6.1 on my laptop with Windows 2000 with no problems,
but when I
tried to install it on my friends laptop with Windows XP, the partition
that I had created for NetBSD wasn't showing up, and I couldn't put a name
for the menu for NetBSD.  During the step where everything was being
copied to my harddrive, and I got this saying the disk was full.  The
program crashed and dumped core.  When I rebooted and retried the
installation, the parition table was blank!
Yasir

On Sat, 15 Nov 2003, der Mouse wrote:

> Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 20:43:02 -0500 (EST)
> From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
> To: port-i386@netbsd.org
> Subject: 1.6.1 sysinst
>
> I just tried to set up a 1.6.1 system for someone else, and I find that
> sysinst is rather severely broken (to the point that if I hadn't known
> what I was doing, I probably would not have been able to install).
>
> Before I go to the trouble of writing up my experiences (and in
> particular before I do a lot of retries while writing down the failure
> modes), I'd like to make sure it's worthwhile.  In particular, I seem
> to recall that a lot has been done to sysinst since 1.6.1 was cut, and
> if that's so, there's little point in re-reporting problems that are
> long fixed.
>
> In case it's of any help, here's a brief synopsis of the problems I
> saw, from memory:
>
> - Partitioning the disk failed; I had to use disklabel -e by hand (from
>    the utility menu's /bin/sh option) to get a label on the disk.
>    sysinst didn't newfs the filesystem and installboot thus couldn't
>    mount it to install the bootblocks.  This was because I had
>    forgotten to specify mount points, but the failure mode did not
>    point to forgotten mount point specifications even to a relatively
>    experienced NetBSD admin, so perhaps sysinst should be coded to
>    check for missing mount point names?
>
> - Autofetching the sets by FTP failed, telling me that / was full,
>    presumably because it was trying to fetch the sets into the mfs /.
>    Even mounting an mfs /tmp and telling it to put things there rather
>    than in /usr/INSTALL didn't help.  I finally mounted an mfs /tmp big
>    enough to hold all the sets, FTPed them by hand, and then told
>    sysinst to get the sets from an existing local directory.  This may
>    be related to the forgotten mount points; I didn't notice that until
>    I'd already FTPed all the sets into the mfs /tmp.
>
> If people think it's worth doing, I can snapshot the disk elsewhere,
> wipe it, and go through the exercise again taking notes.
>
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