Harald Bjoroy wrote:
> 
> First: My solutions
> 
> Hanging OS after disklabel
> ---------------------------
> I managed to wipe the disk by using the Linux boot-disks, I both used
> fdisk and the dd command to make this work, I don't know which was
> causing the success, but now I am able to use disklabel on the disk
> using the NetBSD boot-floppy (and probably by booting the OS from wd0, =
> I
> haven't tried it yet).
> 
> There should be a NetBSD tool (or at least a NetBSD distributed tool)
> for zapping the disklabel area of the disk to fix this kind of =
> problems.

? both /sbin/fdisk and /bin/dd exist on the NetBSD bootfloppy.

> XSM crashing
> ------------
> As the title says, I have also had problems with this. There is
> obviously a problem with xsm which make it crash when it can't
> reverse-lookup the client (or maybe itself?). The machine isn't fully
> configured yet, and without a correctly configured resolv.conf xsm
> crashes.
> 
> This is a bug in xsm. Should I make a problem report to NetBSD about
> this, or is it an XFree problem? It should definitely not crash with a
> core dump, if it can't run it should at least report it in
> .xsession-errors and die.

Agreed - I can't solve this one either.

> Some Questions
> --------------
> Now I have an empty disk which I intend to configure for use for =
> NetBSD.
> I want to use all of the disk as one partition, and mount it as a data
> disk for my Windows machines and for the pmax running NetBSD.
> 
> How should I disklabel this disk? I am confused, but it seems to me the
> correct thing to do is this:
> 
> a: Start at sector 63, end at sector 6281856, type 4.2BSD
> c: Start at sector 0, end at sector 6281856, type unused
> d: Start at sector 0, end at sector 6281856, type unused
> 
> All other partition not defined at all.
> 
> Any comments?

Depending on the BIOS, and assuming you have 6281856 sectors on your
disk, I would try

a: Start at sector  0, end at sector 6281856, type 4.2BSD
c: Start at sector  0, end at sector 6281856, type unused
d: Start at sector  0, end at sector 6281856, type unused

if it is a nice old-fashioned working BIOS, or

a: Start at sector 63, end at sector 6281856, type 4.2BSD
c: Start at sector 63, end at sector 6281856, type unused
d: Start at sector  0, end at sector 6281856, type unused

if it expects to kick off with a DOS partition, and there are 63
sectors per track.

While we're on the subject, is it possible to take a dos disk, plug it
into a NetBSD box, and mount it, without having a spare partition on
it to give over to NetBSD for the disklabel?

Cheers,

Patrick