I just got a new laptop / TablePC.  See 
http://www.acersupport.com/notebook/html/tmc104cti_specs.html for hardware 
specs.

My first attempt to install NetBSD 1.6.1 resulted in a non-bootable system 
and required a re-installation of Windows XP Tablet and all the Acer 
support programs, not fun.

I probably did something dumb but I don't know what.  I've been using 
NetBSD on PC and SPARC since the 1.3x days and prior to totally hosing my 
new laptop thought I had a clue of what I was doing.

The installation was performed as follows:
1)  Resize the 40GB NTFS partition down to 20 GB.  The second partition on 
the drive was created to be a 3 GB FAT32 partition.  The remaining disk was 
left as unused.

Partition 1     NTFS 20 GB
Partition 2     FAT32 3 GB
Partition 3     unused
Partition 4     unused
--------------------------------------------
23GB of 40GB disk used

2)  Boot from IEEE1394 attached CDROM drive using multi1 CD.  This disk has 
done SPARC installs before but not i386...

3)  Setup partition 3 to be NetBSD.  Choose to have a bootloader installed 
by sysinst.

4)  Allow sysinst to start changing disk.

5)  Try to install file sets from CDROM

6)  Say DOOH!!!! when realizing that the BIOS can boot from the 1394 CDROM 
but NetBSD can't see it (at least not yet)

7)  Select FTP to get files and find the NetBSD site won't do FTP

8)  Set up a local FTP server with required files

9)  Scream when MAN and MISC packages don't install since this will cause 
sysinst to abort without making the disk bootable.

10)  Reboot from multi1 CD and try to re-install files and scream when /usr 
partition doesn't pass FSCK.

11)  Launch sh shell and manually fsck /usr partition

12)  Goto step 10 and keep looping until frantic

13)  Load OEM recovery disk and re-install everything; however, keep the 
disk partitions as 20GB FAT32, 3GB FAT32, 17GB unused.

But wait, I said the first partition was NTFS....

Turns out that one of the first things a new C104 does is automatically 
convert it's first partition from FAT32 to NTFS.  My guess is this is done 
because the recovery CDROM is really just fancy window dressing on PKUNZIP.


Any suggestions on how I can back up my drive before the next attempt?  I'm 
currently considering booting to NetBSD 1.6.1 and using dd to dump a copy 
of the first 64 sectors of the disk and another run of dd to dump the 
entire 20GB NTFS image.  These images would be written across the network 
to a "recovery server" with an extra 20+ GB's of storage.  If I FUBAR the 
laptop drive again, I should be able to reformat the drive, boot into 
NetBSD-1.6.1 and use the network interface and the dd program to read the 
data from the network server and put it back on the first 64 sectors and 
the rest of the NTFS image.

Since only about 5GB of the NTFS partition is actually used I'm hoping the 
20GB image can be gzip'd down fit on a DVD-R...

Any thoughts or suggestions welcome at mailto:steven_grunza@ieee.org





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