At 08:19 PM 1/20/98 -0600, you wrote:
>I recall trying to help you with your problem and as I remember you were 
>running some tests for me when you found a solution.  You didn't want to 
>rerun Mkfs at that point and destroy a working setup and that's the last 
>I heard of the problem.

You are correct.  I still have not rerun Mkfs.  At this point however, I'm
almost willing to give it a try.  I have nothing to lose really, except a
few hours in configuring Emacs and Apache and considerably more hours in
compiling the two, but hey, compile time is cheap nowadays..  ;)

If you can outline specifically what you need me to do to test this
(keeping in mind I'm not a BSD guru, but am not totally clueless either)
I'll be happy to, though it may take me a few days to get around to
completing it all depending on how complex the tests you want me to run are.  

>As for your current problem, have you considered building a small NetBSD 
>partition that can be inited with Mkfs and loaded with the Installer, and 
>placing the rest of your NetBSD space in one large partition.  Then 
>running from NetBSD on the small partition use "newfs" to initialize the 
>large partition.  You'll also have the option of making this a BSD 4.4 
>filesystem although that will be incompatible with the Installer.  In any 
>case if you're having problems with Mkfs or the Installer on these larger 
>partitions you wouldn't want to populate it with the Installer since it 
>uses the same disk I/O functions as Mkfs.

I have considered this, though at this point, we're back to square one.
Meaning, I'd have to destroy my BSD partitions and start from scratch as I
originally partitioned all of my disk space minus 150M or so as BSD.  But
as I said, I'm about to the point where I'm willing to do this.

There are some things about this process that I'm not at all clear on
however.  The primary one being, how much of NetBSD (or in my case OpenBSD)
do I need to install in order to have a system that functions enough to
boot multiuser (I assume), run "newfs", and then un-tar the compressed
install files?  I am unclear if I would need essentially a fully functional
BSD system on that small partition, including /usr and so on or what.  The
other thing I am unsure about is how to use "newfs" but I'm sure I can read
that in the man pages when the time comes.  Also exactly how to tell BSD
where to find the new /usr, /var and /home directories once I get the new
larger partition created and formatted using "newfs."  I assume it's just a
matter of editing fstab after manually mounting the respective drives and
installing the proper files to those drives using tar -xvzpf or simply
moving the contents of the existing /usr, /var and /home directories to
their "new" drives.  But again, I'm a little unclear as to exactly how this
would work.  (The actual mechanics of mounting different partitions and
moving stuff from say the existing /usr to the "new" /usr without losing my
ability to read the original currently escapes me.)

Thanks,


Rodney Hopkins
rhopkins@sunflower.com