Argh. All that detail and the answer is so simple. At one point along 
the process,  I was asked if I wanted to write  the MBR partition and I 
kept saying 'no'. Things work a whole lot better if you say 'yes'.

Weird.



On Tuesday, March 4, 2003, at 11:08 AM, Matthew Braun wrote:

> Firstly, let me say thank you to the HPCMIPS community for the support 
> you have given me in the past. I hope that some day I can return the 
> favor in kind.
>
> That being said, I'm still having trouble installing NetBSD on a CF 
> for use in my ePods (thread begun at 
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-hpcmips/2003/01/08/0000.html). I 
> followed Mr. Whitesel's excellent HOWTO at 
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-hpcmips/2000/04/20/0002.html but I'm 
> having new difficulties. The only difference that I have between his 
> setup and mine is that I'm using a 128Mb CF card rather than 192Mb, 
> which one wouldn't think matters but apparently does (or I'm, more 
> likely, missing something).
>
> So here are the steps I go through, following Mr. Whitesel's document 
> and the results it returns.
>
> I'm using a Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDS and the Bootlap1.fs and 
> Bootlap2.fs images for 1.6 and a SanDisk 128Mb  CF card with SanDisk 
> CF-->PCMCIA adapter.
>
> 1) I choose "Install NetBSD to hard disk from the initial menu and 
> "Yes" at the next menu to continue
> 2) NetNSD detects wd0 (the HD) and wd1 (the CF) as I select wd1 as the 
> disk to install to. Elsewhere on the screen I see black-backgrounded 
> text  (rather than the normal blue) reading "pcmcia1:  card irq9" and 
> on the line below it "stray interrupt 9"
> 3) I get a message that sysinst could not automatically determine the 
> BIOS geometry of the disk. I accept it's guess based on the physical 
> geometry as 980 cylinders, 8 sectors, and 32 heads.
> 4) At the next menu, I select the option to use only part of the disk 
> (to make one DOS partition and one NetBSD partition)
> 5) Following the howto I set my size specifier to sectors
> 6) I edit the DOS partition table to have the following layout:
>
>           Start(sec)    Size(sec)    End(sec)     Kind
> 0:       32                5088            5120            DOS FAT16, 
> <32M
> 1:       5120           245760       250880        NetBSD
> 3:                                                                     
>  Unused
> 4:                                                                     
>  Unused
>
> And I set partition 0 as active (though nothing seems to change to 
> indicate this is the case). I then move to the next screen.
> 7) I'm told that the NetBSD part of the disk lies outside of the range 
> that the BIOS on the machine can address and that booting from it may 
> be impossible, but I chose yes to continue (since this is for another 
> machine anyway)
> 8) I'm then told that I appear to have more than one OS and I'm asked 
> if I want to install a bootselector. Since I'll be using PBSDBoot from 
> within WinCE I choose no.
> 9) I'm then asked if I want to use normal bootcode. I say yes.
> 10) Now I get to the disklabel screen and I choose to make a custom 
> disklabel
> 11) My disklabel layout:
>
>      Size          Offset          End          FStype          BSize  
>     Fsize  Preserve  Mount point
> a: 243712     5120           248831  4.2BSD          4096       512    
>  No                    /
> b: 2048          248832      250879  4.2BSD          8192       1024   
> No
> c: 245760      5120          250879  unused
> d: 250880     0                 250879  unused
> h: 5088          32              5119        MSDOS                     
>                                           /c
>
> Note: I'm not clear if wd1b is supposed to be used for swap (and given 
> the debates over swap-on-CF I'd probably steer clear of using it) but 
> for the time being I put it in since it's in the howto, I do it.
> 12) I named the disk 'epodcf' and continue.
>
> 13 ) And the errors begin.
>
> I get a bunch of
>
> wd1d: error reading fsbn 5575681 (wd1 bn 5575681; cn 5956 tn 7 sn 46), 
> retrying
> wd1: (id not found)
>
> errors and then the ugly message:
>
> wd1: disk label I/O error
>
> followed by
>
> NetBSD slice at 5575680, partition C at 5120
> Write outside MBR partition? [n]:
>
> I assume NetBSD is smarter than me, so I accept the default of 'n'. It 
> tries to run newfs and spits out a bunch of similar fsbn errors 
> followed by a disk label I/O error. Then it says
>
> newfs: /dev/rwd1a: open for read: Device not configured
>
> I'm then told that I cant continue. And the process resets.
>
> *SO*, if you've managed to get this far (or if you just skimmed down 
> to the bottom), hopefully I've provided enough detail that someone can 
> see where I've missed something. Otherwise, I'm stumped.
>
> Thanks for any help and advice!
>