On 01.03.06, 14:06:05, Tyler Regas wrote:
> I must be mistaken then. I'm more accustomed to the interactive fdisk from
> DOS and Linux. It looked like the NetBSD partition was listed as d, as in
> wd0d? I don't quite understand the notation yet, so I'm likely wrong. I have
> a 15MB FAT partition at the top of the 2GB card and the rest is a NetBSD
> partition. I'm getting install errors in 2.2 and 3.0 and I'm guessing its

It's strange how you can get as far as actually having stuff copied
to the disk without having done the (nicely interactive) partition
setup before. c and should be clearly marked "NetBSD part of the
disk, don't use", and d as "whole disk, don't use", or something
like that.

> because of old data still there. Hence, I'm trying to format the NetBSD
> partition. I'd rather not delete it all and start from scratch as I don't

The NetBSD partition that is listed in the MBR is that part of the
disk reserved for NetBSD. NetBSD slices  that chunk of the disk
further for its normal partitions (a: root, b: swap, e, f, g, h,
...: everything else). The installation system will do all that for,
in an easy-to-use, interactive way.

If it installs to a perperly formatted FFS partition, there is no
way it could be confused by any "old data" that is still there. Of
course, most of the data is physically still in the disk blocks,
but NetBSD just doesn't care at all. It doesn't read blocks that
are marked as free, it just writes to them if needed. (as does any
other sane filesystem.)

> have a convenient Linux system. 
> 
> Also, I don't know how to use disklabel or newfs. Fsck I can use, though :)

Generally, if you partition with sysinst, you don't need to. Just
remember that partitioning on machines that can also run a Microsoft
operating system (i386, hpc*) partitioning is two-phase. Reserve
space for NetBSD in the MBR, and then partition the space reserved
for NetBSD into proper BSD parititions. As a minimum you will only
need a and b (c and d are always there and have special meanings,
and are generally not used in normal operation.)

It is a good idea to read the INSTALL.txt completely, and also
the NetBSD Guide, they both explain about NetBSD partitions vs.
"DOS partitions".

I hope that clears it up a bit.

> 
> Thanks!
> 

-- 
Bernd Sieker

NetBSD, Feed The Computer.
		-- Andrew Gillham