> > >As for booting -- my guess is that with a new laptop, you won't have 
>> > >any problems; the new BIOSes can handle large disks, and I think that
>> > >
>> > >NetBSD can as well at this point.
>> > 
>> > note that the laptop isn't *all* that new...just the drive is.  the
>> > laptop is two years old.
>> 
>> A two years old laptop _is_ new. LBA wasn't invented yesterday. Even my
>> old PC from 1996 does it. But AFAIK and what I've read in usenet you
>> cannot boot NetBSD from a sector beyond the 1024th.
>
>This is false. NetBSD supports int13 extention since 1998/10/15 (in term of
>release this is NetBSD 1.4)

that said, netbsd seems to boot quite happily from this partition:

2: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
    start 20970432, size 57169728 (27914 MB), flag 0x0
        beg: cylinder 1023, head 254, sector 63
        end: cylinder 1023, head 254, sector 63

i haven't tried "restoring" the win98 stuff yet.  i imagine there'll
be an issue of a boot block in "sector 0" of the partition i have set
aside for that

0: sysid 11 (Primary DOS with 32 bit FAT)
    start 63, size 10485153 (5119 MB), flag 0x0
        beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
        end: cylinder  652, head 171, sector 63

but i haven't gotten there yet.

the only thing that concerns me at the moment is the following message
that the kernel spews at boot time.

WARNING: memory map entry overlaps with ``Compatibility Holes'': 0xe8000/0x4000/0x1

which i never used to get.  it gets printed right at the start of
boot, just after the spinning thing finishes loading the kernel and
before the kernel says how much elf symbol space it's using.  it (and
the elf symbol message) also (unhappily) doesn't show up in the dmesg
output.

so far as i can tell the only other differences between the old disk
and the new disk are:

(1) it's a larger disks
(2) netbsd is "further along" on the disk
(3) the bootblocks are newer

because other than that, i simply restored the stuff i dumped from the
old disk.  the kernel is the same, etc.

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