On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Thomas Mueller wrote:

>from Mike Cheponis <mac@Wireless.Com>:

>> FAT32 works great with NetBSD; I'm running 1.5; I run W2K, >W98se, NetBSD,
>> and Linux all on same machine, sharing the same FAT32 partition.


>Mike, do you run all these OSes in the same FAT32 partition? I knew Linux could
>run in a UMSDOS file system, which would be FAT16 or FAT32, but can NetBSD run 
>in a FAT32 file system? I thought NetBSD needed its own file system.  If NetBSD
>can run in a FAT32 partition, can NetBSD also run in an ext2fs (Linux native)
>partition?  That would be easier for me than FAT32.  If you have four OSes
>sharing the same FAT32 partition, how does the computer know which one to boot?


I have a native partition for each of the OSs.  Here's W98's FDISK says:

                         Display Partition Information

   Current fixed disk drive: 1

   Partition  Status   Type    Volume Label  Mbytes   System   Usage
       1              Non-DOS                 2008                8%
       2              Non-DOS                 4511               19%
       3               NTFS                   1011                4%
    C: 4         A    PRI DOS                16663   FAT32       69%

   Total disk space is 24193 Mbytes (1 Mbyte = 1048576 bytes)

Partition 1 is NetBSD, Partition 2 is Linux, and the 3 and 4 are obvious.

The reason I give so much to Linux is that NetBSD can mount ext2fs, but
Linux (as far as I can tell) cannot mount NetBSD partitions. Therefore, when
I run NetBSD, I can mount -all- the partitions, something NONE of the other 
OSs can do.  Gotta love it!

So, I don't run NetBSD in a FAT32; I run it native, and mount the FAT32 as /c

As for which one to boot, I used Partition Magic to set up the partitions, 
and W2K comes with a boot loader that lets you choose which of the 4 partitions
to boot from.  There are instructions on http://www.netbsd.org for how to
add NetBSD to the NT Bootloader.

-Mike

p.s. I had help from Todd "The Answer Man" Whitesel 
<http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200101/answerman.html>

and Erik Berls <http://www.imrryr.org/NetBSD/sfbanug.html> and others
of our local SF Bay Area NetBSD club to do all this magic - and it's really
not that hard.