Subject: Re: fdisk fun
To: Alan Barrett <apb@cequrux.com>
From: Patrick Welche <prlw1@newn.cam.ac.uk>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/24/2007 16:15:22
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