On Tue Nov 30 1999 at 16:01:02 +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

[snip]

   > > Partition table:
   > > 0: <UNUSED>
   > > 1: <UNUSED>
   > > 2: <UNUSED>
   > > 3: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
   > >     start 212, size 8890008 (4340 MB), flag 0x80
   > >         beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
   > >         end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63
   > > 
   > > I tried various BIOS disk geometries. What can it be?
   > 
   > Actually your BIOS geometry and partition infos don't match.
   > (partition ends at head 255/sect63 but you only have 64 head and 32 sects ???).
   > You should at last adjust this (or let fdisk do it: just start fdisk -u sd0,
   > say you want to change partition 3 and press enter to accept default values).
   > 
   > But the start is not aligned on a cylinder boundary, this may cause problems.
   > You may want to 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0d bs=64k count=10' (just 
   > to be sure) and reinstall.
   > The NetBSD installation tool should find a BIOS geometry by itself and ask if
   > it's correct. It is in most cases.

   I fought with this quite a lot. Or at least I think it is this that I
   fought with. But anyways, I couldn't make the SCSI adapter find NetBSD
   no matter what I did when I did it with NetBSD fdisk. Finally I made a
   dos-bootable floppy and used pfdisk.exe. That made the difference.

   pfdisk does put partitions ending on cylinder boundaries, but that is
   not the key, at least that's what others have said.

   I think this is the same problem as the one described in port-i386/8309

   -- 
     "Never underestimate the power of the Lite side of the \Source/"
    Antti Kantee   /       NetBSD        \  1973 <- draken   \    / o
   <pooka@iki.fi> / http://www.netbsd.org \  platters -> 1999 \  /  |
   ______________/ Free Multiplatform UN*X \___________________\/__ |



I have also been struggling with trying to get a SCSI disk bootable with
NetBSD on one of my machines.  About the only conclusion I have come to is
that the "start", as listed with fdisk [in the above example, 212], must
be the start of the NetBSD "c" [using i386 speak] as listed in the
disklabel.  If this is not true, it seems to create a situation where the
disk has a label, but is not bootable.  I have such a thing going on at
here, where the start of a boot disk got set to 0.  The system and disk is
usable in all respects, except that it can't be booted.  If I reset the
start to 63, where the "c" partition actually is, the system looses track
of the disklabel.


Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org   http://anduin.eldar.org
[finger brad@anduin.eldar.org for PGP public key]