On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 06:35:24PM +0200, Alan Barrett wrote:
> This disk appears to have been installed with the file system starting
> in sector 0, as you said.  In this case, the file system's PBR in
> sector 0 doing double duty as an MBR as well.  THis is sometimes called
> "dangerously dedicated" mode.  Early versions of NetBSD's installation
> instructions used to give this as an option, but AFAIK modern versions
> of sysinst don't allow it.  The bogus size = 16 sectors used to be hard
> coded in the relevant bytes of the PBR, especially to support this
> usage, but the current sys/arch/i386/stand/bootxx/pbr.S doesn't do that.

Thank you for the explanation! I'm "going with the flow" and skipping the
first 63. Indeed I'm writing this email on a 100% NetBSD box with root
on the new disk :-)

Cheers,

Patrick