Stephen Brown <sbrown@best.com> wrote:

> Although I haven't done any significant changes in a while, I was the
> last one to touch the installer code.  I should get a chance in the
> next few days to try to reproduce the problem you're seeing.  I'll
> let you know if I make any progress.  I don't have the exact same
> drive as you're using, but I'm not certain it's really a drive problem.

I read about the tip increasing the memory to the installer or to
install the rest that didn't install by copying the file in
minishell. I tried both with no success. I think we might talk about
different problems with the same symptoms.

I have tried to install on a IBM 2 GB disk and get the same
error message. Unfortunately I get the same error message
trying to create the devices so I can't even boot in single
user mode.

I suspect that the NetBSD/Mac file system code may be broken.
If I boot NetBSD on a Zip and do "disklabel sd0" the output make
no sense. First my hardware setup:

Hardware:       MacIIsi, 17Meg Ram, IBM UltraStar 2GB
                
Software:       NetBSD 1.2.1 current-970829
                Installer 1.1e
                Booter 1.10.?
                Mkfs 1.45

Formatted, then partitioned disk with APS PowerTools 4.1.

Installing to a combined Root & Usr of 1570 MB that was placed after
one MacOS partition and the Swap partition.

It was initialized with the values suggested by "Mkfs_1.45":

         Sector Size:     512
          Block Size:    8192
        Bytes/Sector:     512
       Sectors/Track:     171
     Tracks/Cylinder:       3
       Num Cylinders:    8188
         Bytes/Inode:    4096
     Cylinders/Group:      16
 Spare Sectors/Track:       0
    File System Size: 3140417
 Optimize Space/Time:   Space

The installer reports the disk like

  sd0a: Root 'NetBSD Root & Usr' at  268524 size 3140417
  sd0b: Swap 'NetBSD Swap'       at    6380 size  262144
  sd0d: HFS 'MacOS'              at 3408941 size  817784
  sd0e: Other (APPLE_DRIVER...   at      59 size       5
  sd0f: Other (APPLE_DRIVER...   at     192 size      12
  sd0h: APPLE_FREE 'Extra'       at     204 size      32
  sd0i: APPLE_FREE 'Extra'       at 1227580 size 2999145

The last entry looks strange, it will be a partition inside the
"NetBSD Root & Usr" partition ending at the same block.

But I thought that I could boot up NetBSD from my Zip and do "newfs"
from there instead. NOT. If I ran "disklabel sd0" I got

    Bytes/sector: 512
   Sectors/track: 172
  Tracks/cyliner: 3
Sectors/cylinder: 516
       Cylinders: 8188
    Tot. sectors: 4226725

This is strange because when formatting we where suggested and
formatted with 171 sectors/track, now "disklabel" reports 172.

The rest of the output from "disklabel sd0":

        size     offset  fstype

  a:  817784    3408941  HFS      6606-8191
  b:  262144       6380  swap       12-520
  c: 4226725          0  unused      0-8191
  d:       5         59  unknown     0-0
  e:     128         64  unknown     0-0
  f:      12        192  unknown     0-0
  g:      32        204  unknown     0-0

The letters are moved but in most part it does match the above
one. But "e" is not in the installer listing and the "NetBSD Root &
Usr" partition is gone!

By the way, "disklabel -r" does not work, is this by design or a bug?

Do you know what I can try next to get closer to a working
NetBSD installation?

/kgb