Re: Sysinst "bypass fdisk" option?

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 11:55:01AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 05:53:34AM -0000, Andrew Ball wrote:
> >     I am a NetBSD/i386 user who generally installs on
> > machines that will only ever be running NetBSD. I would much
> > prefer being able to skip fdisk and simply write a BSD disk-
> > label.
> 
> The problem is that without fdisk you have no MBR, and the BIOS will not load
> the first part of the NetBSD bootloader.

That isn't necessarily true, some BIOS just load sector zero to 0x7c00
and the start executing it. Others will verify the contents to some degree
or other.

sysinst is designed to install into the native disk format, for i386
this means that the disks are expected to have an mbr.
To do otherwise just allows naive users to dig themselves into a big hole.

If you try you can put the pbr code into sector zero, start a filesystem
in sector 0 of the disk with a netbsd label in sector 1.
But sysinst wont give you that option.

        David

-- 
David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost