Hi Quentin,

> But does the BIOS care whether there is something partitioned at that 
> place?

Um, no.  It doesn't.

> If not then just make sure you don't have any partition over it in 
> your disklabel.

Um, yes, and to do that requires me to understand how to *achieve* 
that, specifically it requires me to understand the apparent disjoint 
between the cylinder numbers reported by fdisk from the perspective of 
the BIOS, and the cylinder numbers from the perspective of NetBSD.

What I think I am learning from this thread is that NetBSD is not very 
happy with talking to NetBSD (any?) partitions that exist outside the 
scope of its main partition.

With respect to solving the actual problem at hand, I suppose I could 
set one NetBSD-type "fdisk" partition to fill the entire disk, and then 
just subdivide that so there is a 200Mb empty space, positioned some 
7.9Gb from the beginning of the disk; that would provide ample 
hibernation space.

It would probably work, but that would be a bit of a kludge, rather 
than working out how to convert from NetBSD to BIOS cylinder 
addressing.

--
Alec Muffett
alecm@crypticide.com
http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/