> >  Today I hooked up a new hard drive to my Pentium machine.  Drive is for
> > NetBSD only.  Thought all I had to do is to edit a disklabel and write that
> > one.  Disklabel reports me that there is an illegal DOS partition without
> > NetBSD-id.  The drive was never been partitioned under DOS, nor does
> > DOS-fdisk report any partitions.

Was that the exact error message? I've not seen it before, and I
don't understand it the way it's currently phrased.

> >  My question:  What am I supposed to do before/while hooking a new drive?
> > Is "pfdisk" the answer for all new drives, even if for NetBSD-only?
> 
> I believe so....  Since I was doing a fresh
> install, maybe it was easier, since that mandates running "pfdisk" and
> assigning a "NetBSD"-tagged partition, etc.

No, this is not necessary. I currently have ten NetBSD drives
nearby, few of which which have ever had DOS or Windows95 lay their
creepy little hands on them. :-) If it's a new drive, you can just
`disklabel -r -R sd0 protofile' (or whatever options you find
appropriate) and forget about a DOS partition table altogether.
Life is much, much easier this way.

If the disk once had a DOS partition table on it, you'll get a
warning asking you if you're sure you want to write over a DOS
partition table. If the disk is to be devoted entirely to NetBSD,
just say yes to this.

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.