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Re: Sysinst "bypass fdisk" option?



On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 11:55:01AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 05:53:34AM -0000, Andrew Ball wrote:
> >     I am a NetBSD/i386 user who generally installs on
> > machines that will only ever be running NetBSD. I would much
> > prefer being able to skip fdisk and simply write a BSD disk-
> > label.
> 
> The problem is that without fdisk you have no MBR, and the BIOS will not load
> the first part of the NetBSD bootloader.

This is not how I understand the x86 boot code.

If you look in src/sys/arch/i386/stand/bootxx/pbr.S, you'll see it seems
to contain all the magic necessary to take the place of the normal mbr(8).

> Some systems are supposed to be able to boot from a GPT partition table
> and I would love to add sysinst support for that directly, however I've
> been unable to get my hands on such a system so far.

Well, this requires either a EFI-based boot(8),
or a PC-BIOS MBR that understand GPT.

        Jonathan Kollasch

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