>>The disklabel is on the disk, yes.  It's on there, I've rebooted, I've
>>newfs'd the NetBSD partitions.  I just haven't put the NetBSD boot
>>blocks on it... this time.  It boots MS-DOS fine.  It access the
>>partitions under NetBSD fine.  I just can't boot NetBSD from that
>>drive.

>Hmmm.  So what does it do when you try to boot from that parition?  What
>kind of boot selector are you using, or are you just marking partitions
>active using fdisk?

Right.  I was just marking the paritions manually for now.  I can boot
DOS.  When I mark the NetBSD partition, it just tells me something
like "no operating system on disk", or something similar, when I try
to boot it.

When I do a "disklabel -B ...", I can boot NetBSD just fine, but it
toasts the DOS parition table.  If I boot a DOS floppy and run fdisk
after that, it just gives me garbage partition data.

My concern is: where does disklable put the boot blocks?  And, where
should it be putting them?  Should I maybe start the whole disk in the
disklabel at sector one instead of zero, or at cylinder one, instead
of zero?  I dunno...

>>>(I'm wondering about that offset for the MS-DOS parition - usually it's
>>>32, not 63).

>>The time I tried to use NetBSD fdisk it also toasted the DOS
>>partition.  I may have done something wrong, but I don't think so.

>Using the NetBSD fdisk to read the MS-DOS partition table won't harm
>anything (Well, it really shouldn't - it asks you before it writes anything).

Well, no... but I thought you meant do something useful with it... ;-)
It gives the same info as the stuff I have in my protofile...

******* Working on device /dev/rwd0d *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=1048 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cylinder 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=1048 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)

Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 0 is:
sysid 6 (Primary 'big' DOS (> 32MB))
    start 63, size 205569 (100 MB), flag 0
        beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
        end: cylinder  203, head  15, sector 63
The data for partition 1 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
sysid 165 (NetBSD or 386BSD)
    start 205632, size 826560 (403 MB), flag 80
        beg: cylinder  204, head   0, sector  1
        end: cylinder 1023, head  15, sector 63


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                                 michaelv@HeadCandy.com
       --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
     NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, HP300, Sun3, Sun4,
                           DEC PMAX (MIPS), DEC Alpha, PC532
     NetBSD ports in progress: VAX, Atari 68k, others...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------