Ask your IT department for something called "PartitionMagic".
It lets you grow/shrink partitions as desired -- specifically
I'm guessing you want to shrink it to 7/6 vs. 9/4.

				--*greywolf;

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank van der Linden [mailto:frank@wins.uva.nl]
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2000 7:03 AM
To: Steven Grunza
Cc: port-i386@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: New system: can NetBSD live outside of first 8GB of disk?


On Thu, Feb 24, 2000 at 09:53:39AM -0500, Steven Grunza wrote:
> 1)  The network card is not supported (3C905C) (but will be soon after I
> get NetBSD running on it...)

Yep, it is supported in -current and will be in 1.4.2.

> 2)  The IT department put Windows98 on the first 9GB of the disk, leaving
> 4GB free for NetBSD.  I had asked them to put it on the first 7GB, leaving
> 6GB free for NetBSD but that didn't happen.  Can NetBSD boot without
having
> any partitions in the first 8GB of the disk?  What about using a MS-DOS
> boot floppy to run dosboot?  It's taken the IT department over 3 months to
> get this machine configured with corporate software so a failed NetBSD
> install that trashes the disk will be a really bad blow to bringing NetBSD
> in as a "real OS" here.

If the machine is new, it should have a BIOS that supports int13 extensions.
The NetBSD bootcode will detect that these extensions are present, and
use them, making booting from > 8G possible. You will need to make sure
that the NetBSD bootcode is installed in the MBR. Since you want a
bootselector anyway, to boot win98 as well, telling the NetBSD install
to install the boot selector will do this for you.

I have installed NetBSD to partitions > 8G without problems, I don't
expect any trouble for you.

- Frank