>>i installed from scratch on my new 1gb (conner) and can boot up, however,
>>fsck freaks out and says it can't do this disk and i must do it manually.
>>so i get a # prompt and type fsck /dev/sd1a and it says, forget it, there
>>are some bummed sectors here. i believe it names the last few sectors of
>>the disk (huge numbers in the region of 180 000). fsck then either core
>>dumps or, more usually, just gets an exception and exits.
>
>What machine? Does your kernel have Allen's ncrscsi or Scott's sbc SCSI
>driver? The former is a nice driver from a nice guy, but it is very picky
>about hard disks. ;) It has told me nonsense about damaged media on a
>Quantum LPS105 before.

generic #47. i *think* it's ncrscsi. Any other suggestions for a different
kernel?
where to get :-) ?

>
>>when i run mkfs, it sees all three and i try format the untitled partition,
>>and it does it and says 'i don't remmer any errors' - BUT before it starts
>>it *does* say, "warning, 690 unused sectors". I presume that is what is
>>causing fsck to freak out. So how do i force it to fully format that disk?
>>it seems to format most of it and just leave out the last few sectors. the
>>result is then that fsck refuses to give a thumbs up to the disk..
>
>DON'T PANIC.

i'm trying hard :-( but it's hard when the unix is panicking itself.

>
>The disk has a varying number of sectors per cylinder. A lot of hitech OSes
>like CP/M, MSDOS or Un*xes can't cope with such a revolutionary scheme, so
>it tries to map its sectors to a fictitious set of fixed numbers of sectors
>per track per head, which leaves a reminder.
>
>Nothing to worry about. Really.

i figured out as much, but it seemed as tho the unix was fussing about this
fact and coredumping in response.

>>A weird point
>>too: despite having a separate 'untitled' partition, netbsd mounts
>>'untitled' and 'root&usr' as if they were the same partition - so i cannot
>>run formatting tools from root&usr to hit 'untitled' because as far as
>>netbsd is concerned, there is no separate partition. weird weird weird!
>
>1) I am not sure the netbsd kernel can make much sense of an 'untitled'
>partition. Make that a 'A/UX Usr Slice 2' type partition; no problem with
>having more than one on a disk.

ok, i'll try it :-)
does this mean i have to have a 'usr' partition in the first place?
at the moment i only have the standard root&usr single part, not separated
root (1) usr(2).

>
>2) If you allocate more (e.g. MacOS) partitions on the disk, make sure the
>netbsd partitions come first; the kernel cannot see more than eight of
>them. If you fiddle with a netbsd partition afterwards, it is appended to
>the END of the partition table and may disappear from the kernel's sight.
>

aha. that may be a problem. do driver partitions count?

>3) Give the netbsd newfs(8) a try (e.g. from a miniroot); it is a hell of a
>lot faster than Mkfs and I personally trust it more. And don't forget '-O'
>if you want to access the partition from the MacOS Installer.
>

i can't do that till i'm booted :-)
but i'll give it a bash if i can.

thanks a lot!

_________________________________________________________________________
John Ostrowick
Computer Science Department, University of the Witwatersrand
1 Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg, South Africa. 1st Floor, Senate House 1012
Phone: +27 (011) 716-3783
jon@cs.wits.ac.za or jon@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za or jon@is.co.za
My web page is on my server's: http://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/
My ftp site: ftp://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/macenroe/pub/
My listserv: subscr@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za (any message with a body)