Having fallen out of bed and thus gotten to work early, I decided to test
installation of NetBSD-1.3ALPHA using the method of installing onto a bare
disk from a running Ultrix system and dd'ing diskimage onto the swap par-
tition.

Installation was attempted on a DECstation 5000/25 running Ultrix 4.5,
to a bare RZ28M 2.1 GB disk at SCSI ID 3.  As an aside, the arrow keys
did not work for me in sysinst.

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First, here are a few minor suggestions for sysinst (which is really a
neat tool, btw):

1)  confirm, at the time of selection, which disk was selected to be the
	install target

2)  confirm this *again* at the "this is your last chance" prompt

3)  it's annoying, in the "change partitions" dialog, to have 'd' mean
	"change e" and 'f' mean "change g", etc.

4)  it'd be *nice* to leave the whole partition table on the screen when
	changing partitions, in case I forget what I was supposed to
	change the offset or size to, for example

5)  I wanted to change the /usr mount point from partition d to partition
	g, but I couldn't figure out how to make the mount point for par-
	tition d be *blank*.  Marking the partiion as "unused" worked,
	of course.

6)  perhaps a plain text copy of the man page for sysinst could be placed
	in the installation directory along with the NOTES file - other-
	wise, there doesn't seem to be any place to read about it

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A few comments for the installation instructions contained in the file
called "NOTES":

The installation instructions need to cover what to do at the prompts
that ask for the dump device and the file system type, and should mention
typing <return> at "Enter pathname of shell ...".

It would also be nice if the installation instructions specified how big
diskimage.gz was gonna expand to, so I could have warm fuzzies about how
the dd onto the swap partition wasn't gonna be bigger than my swap par-
tition *is*.

In three places, the instructions say

	then continue from the ``Once you get root prompt''.

but that phrase appears nowhere else in the file.  I figured out where
to go, of course, but it'd be nice if the wording matched.

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And now, the saga of a minor failure:

In my partitioning of an RZ28M for NetBSD installation, I used sysinst
with the "megabytes" units option.  I then specified that the g partition
was to be 900 megabytes starting at offset 161; this gave me a computed
end of 1061.  Therefore, I set the h partition to offset 1061 and length
945 megabytes.

This caused a minor problem in that the h partition ended at 2006 instead
of the correct 2007.  I changed the h partition size to 946, and the end
now comes out correctly at 2007, but sysinst hammered my offset back to
945.  I know all this is just fighting rounding errors; but I thought I'd
report the observation anyway.

More serious, however, was that the remainder of the NetBSD installation
believes that the g and h partitions overlap, so I aborted the install.
sysinst should prolly mention at some point that the partitions overlap
before allowing the installation to proceed.

(Of course, from the figures I put in, the partitions *shouldn't be*
overlapped; I haven't looked to see what actually happened yet.)

I then simply tried to re-run sysinst, but after diddling the partitions
again and telling it to continue, I get the

  "newfs /dev/rz3a failed unexpectedly with return code Unknown error: 256"

which I believe has been mentioned by somebody else.

But now I need to convince sysinst that this disk is really bare, even
though it looks a great deal as though NetBSD is already installed on it.

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Installation procedures are *really* coming along nicely!  Thanks to every-
body involved.

Terry R. Friedrichsen

terry@venus.sunquest.com