On 2004-08-11 dennisjscott@yahoo.com wrote:

> First I tried the 2 cf card attempt. with the 128
> being wd1 and 2.2gig being wd0.  I run the hpcboot
> from the wd1 and select to boot from netbsd.gz select
> nec mobilepro 780 from dropdown and hit boot.

  This should work well.

> failed: command failed
> newfs /dev/rwd0a
> newfs:/dev/rwd0a: open for read: device not configured

  It looks like there is a problem writing the disk label.  Either that or
the disk is not detected properly or has errors.  First try less
/kern/msgbuf (skip over some nulls at the beginning) and check that the
attach messages are as expected and there are no disk errors that somehow
got lost in sysinst.  You can also try mounting a dos partition on the
disk and writing to it (if you change the size and are leaving it in the
final setup, make sure it gets reformatted by CE before trying to use it.
Don't attempt to use newfs_msdos, as it doesn't work well.).

If all that looks fine, try "disklabel /dev/wd0" and see if that looks
like the partition map you set.  If not, I don't know much about how
sysinst is working now, but you can do the label manually by "disklabel
wd0 > /tmp/dl", edit that with vi (if you use a single partition you can
get the sector values from fdisk.  I recommend no swap on cf due to the
write limits), and then do "disklabel -r -R /dev/wd0 /tmp/dl" to label the
disk.  Then if there are no errors, "disklabel /dev/wd0" it again and see
if it stuck.  If it did, try sysinst again.  If you don't want to do this
manually or hit errors, post what you find in the dmesg (msgbuf) and
disklabel.  Someone else may also have a better idea what precicely is
going on.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@city-net.com