I'm trying to install NetBSD 1.1 on a IDE machine whose BIOS disk geometry is
as follows: 524C / 64H / 63S. Dos lives up through cyl 100. When I try to
install, all goes well except for the installation of the boot blocks -- after
the kernel is copied to the disk and a reboot, all I get is read error :-(.

The disklabel / newfs / distribution installation goes fine, as examined
when I boot via floppy without going through install and mount the
filesystems by hand.


I think that the problem resides in when it does the disklabel -w -B, and
I see:

disklabel: warning, DOS partition table with no valid NetBSD partition
Erase the previous contents of the disk? [n]

If I answer no, then no partition is created in the table, and things get hosed.
If I answer yes, then it does something *really* funky with the partition
table and I have to use pfdisk to rebuild the DOS partition table, in that it
gets eaten.

Neither case gives me NetBSD boot blocks where BIOS looks for them (don't
ask me where they end up).

Pfdisk reports the following geometry / partitioning for DOS, which I worked
around in the NetBSD install:

geometry 524 64 63

#	ID	First(cyl)	Last(cyl)	start, length(sectors)
1	4	0		100		63, 401769
2	128	101		200		407232, 403200

(I fudged the ID of 128 for the NetBSD partition (2) using pfdisk. What is 
the proper ID for NetBSD / FreeBSD / 386BSD ?)

Anyway -- What should I do to this box to get a proper partition table
and NetBSD boot code?

Thanks in advance!
James Robinson


James Robinson                             Phone: (704) 547-4876
Department of Computer Science             FAX:   (704) 547-3516
UNC Charlotte                              email: jlrobins@uncc.edu
Charlotte, NC 28223-0001                   System Administrator