On Sat, 23 Jul 2005 20:22:27 -0700
Andy Ruhl <acruhl@gmail.com> wrote:

> My follow on question is, do these things boot off the hard disk on
> their own? I read a post from 2002 telling me how I need to have a
> partition of type 65 first, and then I can put NetBSD after that, and
> so on. Is this required?
Yes. You need one MBR partition of type 65 for the kernel and an
additional MBR partition for NetBSD. The later in turn contains the
NetBSD disklabel(5)...

> This is what I did, but I'm still netbooting the kernel at this point
> and just going through the prompts to get it to boot from sd0a.
You have to dd(1) the generic kernel to the special partition of type
65.

Make sure you saved the output of fdisk(8) and disklabel(8), preferabley
copy it to an other machine or to paper. You may overwrite the MBR
partition table when the kernel is dd(8)ed to disk. In that case you
have to restore the old MBR partition table.

> I tried netbooting the GENERIC kernel that comes with the 2.0.2
> distribution sets, and I watched it with ethereal. There is an error,
> something about out of space? Can we only netboot certain sized
> kernels on these? Problem was, it said this after maybe 40 blocks, and
> the generic.fs is certainly larger than that...
I know of no error. But I know cases where puting the ethernet interface
of the boot server into promiscues mode (tcpdump(8)) made netbooting
impossible.

> If there is something I can read to get this thing to boot itself from
> the hardware, I can take a crack at writing a short FAQ or boot guide
> or something.
Have a look at the mailing list archive. There are several posts of
different methods to make the disk bootable.

Usually I do it this way:
save output of fdisk(8) and disklabel(8).
dd(1) kernel image like generic.fs to raw disk.
	ATTENTION! This overwrites the MBR partition table.
restore MBR partition table according to saved fdisk(8) output.
reboot and pray. ;-)

Note: If you compile your own kernel you have to convert the ELF image
to a .fs image including bootloader and kernel with mkbootimage(8).
--=20


tsch=FC=DF,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/