In message <199903021717.LAA02717@harper.uchicago.edu>
Wenchi Liao writes
>I'm trying to install 1.3.3 on a gift laptop. The laptop is a dell
>latitude 450 xp with 23M of ram. It had a dos system, but I had sysinst
>take the entire drive for netbsd's use.

I dontk now about the 55-minute pause during boot, but:

>During the install process, I think newfs reports ``the disk to be old
>NetBSD or FreeBSD -- see installboot(8).'' Going to the the netbsd man
>pages on the web, installboot(8) doesn't seem to have relevent
>information. A general web search didn't find anything useful, and a
>half-hearted search through the i386-port archives didn't help either.
>
>WL

>From the -current manpage:


BUGS
     NetBSD is in transition from using the 386BSD MBR partition-ID of 165
     (0xa5), to using a new, unique partition-ID of 169 (0xa9).  NetBSD ver-
     sions newer than 1.3.3 will use the new partition-ID if one is found, and
     if not, fall back to the old ID of 165 with a warning. To eliminate the
     warning, update your bootblocks and installboot to 1.3.3 or newer, rerun
     installboot on the affected drives, and lastly use fdisk(8) to change the
     MBR partition-ID of NetBSD partitions to 169.

     Note that the final step of changing MBR partition-IDs from 165 to 169
     renders a disk unbootable by older NetBSD kernels, which do not recognize
     the new ID.

     The NetBSD/i386 boot blocks can only read from the first 1024 cylinders
     of the disk because they use the BIOS to do their I/O. Thus, it is advis-
     able that ``a'' partitions reside entirely within the first 1024 cylin-
     ders.

     The BIOS partition table must reflect the correct location of the NetBSD
     portion according to disk geometry used by the BIOS. (This is automati-
     cally the case if the NetBSD portion is located at the beginning of the
     disk.)

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