At 8:22 PM -0700 4/25/00, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>On Sun, 23 Apr 2000, Armen Babikyan wrote:
>
>> I was pretty sure there was nothing wrong with the disk, so i booted off
>> another NetBSD partition, newfs'ed and installed tarballs with tar, and
>> this process worked fine, with no signs of errors. I booted off this drive,
>> and everything seems to be working perfectly normally.  The / still showed
>> up as not valid when i launched the installer program.
>
>Oops. You can't use newfs to make file systems the installer will use. You
>have to use "newfs -O".
>
>From man newfs:
>
>     -O          Creates a 4.3BSD format filesystem.  This options is primari-
>                 ly used to build root filesystems that can be understood by
>                 older boot ROMs.
>
>The installer (and booter) both only understand the older format.
>

Hm,

I used newfs without the -O argument and according to disklabel, the
filesystem is 4.2BSD.  So I suppose I did do the right thing by using
"newfs", instead of "newfs -O". The latest booter works fine with my
filesystem too. Its just the installer that breaks.

So apparently the numerically higher version (4.3BSD) is used for machines
with old boot roms, whereas 4.2BSD is what is normally used by
NetBSD/mac68k? Interesting.

As someone pointed out to me, this was mentioned on the FAQ (problem about
partitions > 1gig). I forgot about this problem. (maybe Steve Revilak's
workaround should go on the FAQ too)

Thanks,

  - a