Re: Readying a disk for booting NetBSD-5

[Eduardo Horvath <eeh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2010, DL wrote:

> Martin:
> Thank you for the tips re: the filesystem choice
> (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.netbsd.general/28715).  From that I decided
> to go ahead and try to have sysinst put the 5.1 RC2 /, base and etc sets onto 
> a
> FFSv2 filesystem.  Did I understand you correctly that the 5.1 RC2 sysinst
> should be able to make that work?
> 
> I thought I ran the sysinst okay by using the entire disk for /.  Thinking 
> that
> sysinst would need to put something in the first one or two disk sectors I 
> first
> tried to offset the start of the / partition by 2 sectors. sysinst did not 
> like
> that though and I ended up just setting / up in the disklabel starting from 
> the
> default sector 0.  The rest of the sysinst appeared to go as expected.

Don't worry about any of that.

The disklabel takes up 1 sector.  The bootblock takes up 15 sectors.  And 
BSD filesystems skip the first 16 sectors.

> 
> Yet upon rebooting from OpenBoot I am seeing the same "Invalid superblock 
> magic"
> result that Chris saw
> (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.netbsd.ports.sparc64/6662). Should I 
> question
> my choice of the FFSv2 filesystem?  Or should I be looking for something else
> about the way that I had sysinst put the NetBSD installation onto the disk?

I think the 5.9 bootloaders only support FFSv1.  If you want v2 or LFS 
support you need to use -current.

Eduardo