Woohoo and a big sigh of relief!

With a bit more digging in the archives I've managed to uncover a solution 
to the hard drive problem.

(Thanks Valeriy E. Ushakov 26/05/2001 -- 05/26/2001 if you're American)

I didn't notice the `unmounted file system' option and had been looking at 
the instructions for a `local drive' (!)

I've successfully installed NetBSD from my DOS partition, but I would still 
appreciate any hints on the floppy problem. I figure I must be missing 
something relatively obvious, which should make it difficult to solve 
myself. :)

Thanks
David


>Hi. I'm trying to install 1.5 on an old 486 with 16Mb of RAM, ~300Mb HD, & 
>no modem, network, or CDROM.
>
>I read the install file and thought I was fine - partitioning was fairly 
>easy (compared to what I thought it would be) and the install seems fine. 
>Except that I can't figure out how to get at the set files.
>
>I tried RaWrite-ing the *.tgz files onto floppies, but RaWrite breaks down 
>and says there's a disk error in sector one. (For every disk I've tried.) 
>The install file is a little vague about this point. It says copy all of 
>the set_file.xx files onto disks. I'm now thinking that it doesn't mean 
>using RaWrite (that's only for the boot disks). But the .tgz files are too 
>big for floppies to be directly copied.
>Does "set_file.xx" mean:
>=> the *.tgz files
>=> the *.tar files inside them (even bigger!)
>=> or the variously named files inside the .tar ones (though some of these 
>are too big for a floppy, notably the kernel)
>
>
>Alternatively, when I couldn't get the floppies working I tried to install 
>from the hard disk.
>I copied the *.tgz files from my main PC using floppies and Slice (16) 
>onto a DOS partition. But I can't access the DOS partition during the 
>install. The install file shows how to mount a DOS partition on the second 
>boot, and I have seen a couple of similar things in the mailing lists, but 
>they all rely on the "mount" command. I paused sysint and tried to do a 
>few things, but whenever I typed "mount" it said
>
>         Cannot open `/etc/fstab': No such file or directory
>
>so presumably I can't access the partition until I've finished the install 
>(kinda chicken and egg, eh?).
>
>
>so
>Q: Which files are supposed to be on the disk and how do I get them on?
>Q: How can I (easily and painlessly, if possible) access the sets in the 
>DOS partition?
>
>An answer to one or both would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
>TIA David
>(BTW I'm not on the list, so you'll have to email me directly. Sorry.)