On a second, identical system (by the way the bios calls the hard
drive a wdc wd100bb 75aua1) I did the installation, making sure to use
the partial disk (and fdisk). When everything was installed the system
would not even get to the bsd boot sequence and would simply display:
no operating system.

Booting off the CDROM, going to the shell and zeroing out the first 10
sectors:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/wd0d bs=512 count=10

and then doing yet another reinstall, cured this problem.

I don't know if this is an artifact from having Linux (redhat 7.0 with
a 2.4.2 kernel), something bizarre with bios on Dells, or
what. However, I find it very odd that a fresh install, which
nominally partitions and formats the floppy disk doesn't work until
the first few sectors are manually zeroed out before an installation.

   Larry

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 02:21:18PM -0800, Larry Colen wrote:
> I was installing netbsd 1.5 on a Dell Poweredge 350 off the CDROM
> from Demon News.
> 
> It would complete the installation.
> I'd reboot and it would not even go into the kernel and would just
> display the message: 
> invalid partition table
> 
> It seemed to be fixed by rather than just using the whole disk, only
> installing a a part of the disk, which seemed to force the system to
> use a dos style partition table.
> 
> I don't know if anyone else has had this problem, or if it's
> considered a bug, or just the way things work (or don't work).
> 
>    Larry
> 
> -- 
> Larry Colen - Recourse Technologies - lrc@recourse.com - 650-381-8090

-- 
Larry Colen - Recourse Technologies - lrc@recourse.com - 650-381-8090