Hi!

(I know this is a FAQ but I haven't been able to fix this despite
all efforts so please help me)

Problem: NetBSD won't boot from hard drive, I have to "boot wd0a:netbsd"
         from CD-ROM.

I got just a bigger hard disk for my laptop and installed first Win2k
on it. After Windows I installed NetBSD but it didn't boot :-(
I installed FreeBSD to the same partition as NetBSD and it worked
just fine.

It seems like NetBSD is getting wrong geometry. The real geometry
is 16383/16/63 but BIOS (and pfdisk and FreeBSD) reports 1023/240/63.
The installation program reports 1023/240/63 so I accepted it.
After installation fdisk reports this:

    ROOT localhost:~> fdisk
    NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
    cylinders: 16383 heads: 16 sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)

    BIOS disk geometry:
    cylinders: 1023 heads: 240 sectors/track: 63 (15120 sectors/cylinder)

    Partition table:
    0: sysid 7 (OS/2 HPFS or NTFS or QNX2 or Advanced UNIX)
        start 63, size 14336721 (7000 MB), flag 0x0
            beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
            end: cylinder  948, head  47, sector 63
    1: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
        start 14336784, size 20469456 (9994 MB), flag 0x80
            beg: cylinder  948, head  48, sector  1
            end: cylinder  253, head 239, sector 63
    2: <UNUSED>
    3: <UNUSED>

Changing values with "disklabel -e" to make "NetBSD disklabel disk geometry"
same as "BIOS disk geometry" and installing a new boot loader (installboot)
didn't help anything. The same thing with "fdisk -u".

What should I do?

Martti

---
Martti Kuparinen <martti.kuparinen@iki.fi>              NetBSD - No media hype
http://www.iki.fi/~kuparine/                            http://www.netbsd.org/