The following reply was made to PR install/31274; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Pavel Cahyna <pcah8322@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>
To: David Laight <david@l8s.co.uk>
Cc: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: install/31274: can't install with single large partition easily, sysinst menu is inconsistent
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 11:29:12 +0200

 On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 10:10:41AM +0100, David Laight wrote:
 > What does 'sysctl machdep.diskinfo' report?
 > My guess is 80:39070080(1022/240/63),0 wd0:80
 > The ',0' indicates that LBA reads aren't (being reported as) supported.
 
 It reports 80:39070080(1022/240/63),2 wd0:80
 
 > > But the BIOS is probably a bit strange. fdisk says:
 > ...
 > > BIOS disk geometry:
 > > cylinders: 1022, heads: 240, sectors/track: 63 (15120 sectors/cylinder)
 > > total sectors: 39070080
 > ...
 > > the "heads" value looks nonstandard and the BIOS already confused GNU
 > > Parted, which made NT unbootable by setting the geometry values in their
 > > boot sector to different values when shrinking the partition.
 > 
 > It is certainly more usual to use 1024 cylinders and 255 heads for the
 > facked geometry.  But other values are used.
 > Possibly the BIOS has some options for that disk - like 'LARGE', LBA' etc
 > the different ones will give different faked geometries.
 
 It does not have any such option.
 
 > > Also, why did sysinst offer to create circa 0.5 GB root? The NetBSD
 > > partition starts at ~ 5 GB, and 5.5 GB is not near any BIOS or IDE magic
 > > limit IIRC.
 > 
 > sysint has default sizes for / and /usr (which are horridly out of date)
 > which are, hopefully,  just about big enough for a simple install.
 > It will try hard to stop you making parts of / unreadablt by the BIOS.
 
 Yes, but how would making a 0.5 GB / starting at 5 GB stop me making part
 of it unreadable? What is the size limit for non-LBA reads?
 
 Pavel Cahyna