> And I cannot seem to use "unmounted fs" or "local dir"
...
> At this point I'm confused. How do I access the DOS partition? That's where
> my distribution sets are.

At this month's South Bay Area NetBSD User's Group Meeting (actually, five of
us at a Round Table Pizza), we helped Mike Cheponis install his PC laptop and
it was a lot like this: no network, tgz files on MS-DOS partition.

It was nasty. We had to determine the correct numbers for the MS-DOS partition
and then suspend (control-Z) sysinst at about the point where you got stuck.
Then we used "disklabel -e" to add a partition to the BSD part of the disk
so that "mount -t msdos /dev/wd0f /mnt2" would work. (This invokes 'ed' which
fortunately, Erik Berls remembered how to use 'blind' without any man pages
whatsoever.)

Once we had the new partition in the disklabel, we used "fg" to get back into
sysinst and used "unmounted fs" to proceed, and it finished without incident.

So while it is certainly possible, it is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Since the process is actually very straightforward for C code, there really
is no reason why sysinst could not have an option to mark certain MS-DOS
partitions so that matching partitions will be added to the NetBSD disklabel.
It also would help lots of newbies on PC's, because one of the first questions
they ask is "how do I mount my FAT partitions?"

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com