On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 03:08:35PM -0500, Todd wrote:
> Hello,
> 	I hope I'm sending this to the right place, I just signed up last night and 
> tried this earlier with the i386 port maintainer. Sorry if I wasn't supposed 
> to do that. Anyhow, I recently acquired two old laptops. A Zenith Z-Lite 
> 425L, 486, 4MB RAM, 163MB hdd, and an IBM Think Pad 755Cs 486, 8MB RAM, 163MB 
> hdd. I am trying to install NetBSD1.5.2 on each. Neither install is going as 
> planned. My background includes Win/dos, IBM AS400, and some Red Hat but 
> mostly as a driver, not a mechanic. These seemed like good machines to get to 
> experiment with. I tried slackware and mulinux, but didn't get too far with 
> them. NetBSD is the first I've tried that seems to have any interest in 
> working for me.   
> 	On the Zenith, I used the Tiny Install. I have done alot of searching 
> through the BSD archives and found some solutions that even I could do. I 
> exited the installer to the shell prompt and ran disklabel -i wd0. This gave 
> me a partition prompt and using the commands listed, I mimicked how the 
> installer would have created the partitions.(been through the installer about 
> 50 times) I then wrote the partitions and assigned a label to the drive. The 
> problem is when I fire up sysinst, it does not see the label or any of the 
> partitioning. I've tried letting installer create the partitions and ^Z to a 
> shell prompt to activate the swap. However at that stage of the game, there's 
> no resources left and the install fails, out of swap. 

Before doing 'disklabel -i' you need to run 'fdisk -i' then 'fdisk -u' in
order to create a NetBSD partition in the MBR partition table.

> 	On the IBM, I've tried both Bootlap and Tiny, the results are the same. I 
> get through the local install cleanly, it seems, but when I try to complete 
> the install through ftp, I get a uvm_fault kernel trap code=0 and a dc> 
> prompt. Actually, Tiny fails so fast and reboots, I can't see what it didn't 
> like. Not knowing any better at the time, I tried transferring the files to 
> my own ftp server and running the install from there. I suppose I don't need 
> to tell you that didn't help. I've searched on this topic as well but haven't 
> found anything I can work with. Tiny and Bootlap don't seem to recognize the 
> hardware in the same manner. For example, Tiny reads the pcmcia network 
> adapter as ne2  assigning it IRQ9, Bootlap reads ne0, assigning IRQ11. 
> Probably irrelevant since both seemed to connect.      
> 	I'm at a brick wall. That in itself wouldn't be so bad but my BSD toolbox 
> contains little more than an upholstry hammer at the moment. Any help or 
> advice, other than eating a bullet, would be greatly appreciated :) Thanks 
> for your time, Todd

At the db> prompt, can you type 'tr' and post here the trace ?

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
--