Josh Kuperman wrote:

>I believe part of my problem has to do with having a partition within
>NetBSD begin after 1GB has been used; i.e. having over 1GB passed
>where the MacOS is partitioned allocated to NetBSD, and then having a
>partition start more than 1GB from the start of the NetBSD
>installation. I am resigning myself to simply a root, swap, and user
>partition. None of them starting after 1GB. Currently I'm just using
>root,swap, and usr and that seems to be fine - so far.
>

Partitions begining past the 1Gig boundary only cause occasional problems 
with the Installer. If you're doing a Sysinst type install this should be 
a non-issue.  I've installed on disks as large as 18Gig with Sysinst.  
However if you're using a 3rd party disk formatter that isn't properly 
supporting large disks this could be a problem. It isn't a problem with 
Apple's Disk Setup utility, although on the 68k Mac it will limit 
partiton sizes to a maximum of 4.3Gig as I recall.  I got around this by 
partitioning my disk on a PPC Mac, but you could also use pdisk to do 
this on a 68k Mac.  Pdisk is the MkLinux disk partitioning tool.  I've 
modified a copy of it to properly initialize NetBSD partitions and built 
a version that runs on the 68k.

>...
>
>>  3) Boot the Installation Kernel for NetBSD.  It's on the CD.
>
>I tried simply pointing the booter to the kernel on the CD once and
>that failed. I've been copying it to the hard drive. Should I be able
>to simply point everything to the CD and run it.
>
Copying the Installation Kernel to the MacOS HFS disk is fine.  I've 
never tried booting it directly off the CD which might not work.  The CD 
wasn't created with Toast and may not have all the hidden Apple 
Extensions necessary, or the Booter may be trying to update the Resource 
Fork of the file.
 
>>  4) Do the install using the CD - you'll have to change the default 
>> directory path but
>
>> 
>> As a precaution you might want to install the kern_sbc kernel rather than 
>> the kern one.
>
>Given my experience and the other things I read, combined with using a
>Quantum Fireball I always use sbc if I can.  Though I assume that the
>netbsd-INSTALLSBC.gz sysinst kernel will install the SBC kernel. I
>hope that's correct.
>

I forgot what type of system you have.  Someone will correct me if I'm 
wrong, but I believe the 660AV uses the esp SCSI so you don't need to 
worry about using the SBC kernel.

>> 
>> If you install using Sysinst you won't be able to use the MacOS Installer 
>> application, but you shouldn't need it anyway.  It doesn't recognize the 
>> filesystem used by Sysinst.  The Booter application still works, but 
>> usually only on small root filesystems.  For that reason it's almost 
>> required that you allocate separate root, swap and usr filesystems as a 
>> minimum. Keep the root filesystem small, probalby no larger than 16Meg. 
>> 
>
>This is odd because I've been creating root partitions between 5 and
>30 times that size with no noticeble problems.  Other than trying to
>create a partition that begins behind the 1GB mark withing NetBSD, I
>haven't had problems. I do always have to remember to significantly up
>the memory for the Booter application; I set its application memory to 30M.
>

The Booter (and the Installer) only know about BSD 4.2 type filesystems; 
Sysinst creates a BSD 4.3 type.  The two are similar for small 
filesystems but diverge when the filesystems get large.  Thus the Booter 
will generally succeed with a BSD 4.3 type filesystem, provided the inode 
number for the kernel isn't too large.  On a large filesystem it's 
possible for the Kernel to be assigned an inode number that is 
out-of-range for the BSD 4.2 filesystem and thus become unbootable via 
the Booter.  That's the reason you want to keep your root filesystem 
small.  (And this may not be an exact technical explaination, but it's 
close.)

If you use the Sysinst method and you create a combined Root&Usr on a 
large partition it's possible the newly installed system will not be 
bootable via the Booter.  This wasn't a problem with the early versions 
of Sysinst because it forced you to have a separate Root and User 
partition.  I'm not sure, but I thought I'd heard that the latest version 
of Sysinst no longer enforces that restriction.  But until the Booter 
becomes capable of supporting BSD 4.3 filesystems you should always build 
a small Root partition.

>What I have now is a small system, the booter application, and the
>install kernel on about a 20M MacOS partition. (I keep the other tools
>on abootable  syquest drive - BTW, I haven't been able to get a clue on 
>how to
>mount the sysquest when NetBSD is running). 
>
>I'm not completely sure about some of what your saying - i.e. I don't
>know if I needed to copy the netbsd-INSTALLSBC.gz kernel to my MacOS
>HD partition or if I can actually load it off the CD.

Just copy the netbsd-INSTALL.gz file to your MacOS HFS hard disk and 
point the Booter at it.

I think the install path used by Sysinst defaults to 
"/mac68k/binary/sets...".  On your CD the path should be 
"/NetBSD-1.5/mac68k/binary/sets...".

-bob