I recently installed NetBSD 1.1 on my machine.  I ran into some difficulty
but managed to figure it out with help from the email archives and some FAQ
documents.  Thanks to those who have prepared them.

My scenario was to split a 1 G hard disk for DOS/Windows and NetBSD given 
that my BIOS is old (1993) with no support for large drives.  I also
determined via "school of hard knocks" that Ontrack Disk Manager products
are NOT COMPATIBLE with NetBSD - even when used in manual mode with BIOS
rather than their proprietary formatting scheme.

Disk geometry is 2097 cyl, 16 heads, 63 sect, 512 bytes/sect

I used "pfdisk" to create a DOS/Windows partition of 1000 cylinders, and
a BSD partition of 800 cylinders (the rest being spare for future use).
"pfdisk" is fine so long as the partitions all begin before 1024.  The reason
I didn't use all of the first 1024 for DOS is that enough of the BSD
partition has to be in the first 1024 cylinders for my BIOS to be able
to load the kernel during boot (up to the point where the kernel takes
over and no longer uses the BIOS).

I formatted the DOS partition and reinstalled DOS.

I then installed NetBSD.

I then installed OS-BS.

Then it was time to get the rest of the distribution off of the DOS
partition (since my Internet Access is still via DOS/Windows).

My difficulty here was in attempting to edit the disk label so that I could
access the MSDOS file system to load the rest of the NetBSD
distribution without using a whole slew of floppies (ran out since my
backup used up 90 of them ;-)

The edit function of disklabel attempts to invoke the "vi" text editor so 
you can add the entry for the MSDOS partition.  Unfortunately VI is not on
the boot kernel intall floppy nor the installation floppy.  Fortunately
I had access to a UNIX system to unpack the distribution and grab selected
executables and then FTP them to my PC (under DOS/Windows).  I wrote them to
floppy and then used the "Load_fd" command to read these in.  This took a
couple of attempts since I needed some shared libraries to get VI to work.
I grabbed all the shared libraries since I didn't know the minimum required
for VI.

Please consider creating a ".fs" or a small ....tar.gz file capable of fitting
into a single floppy which will expand the bare bones NetBSD system sufficient
to allow extracting the rest of the system from an MSDOS file system.  An
alternative would be to allow entry of the MSDOS file system parameters
during installation as has been suggested by others.


Regards,


Darcy

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Darcy L. Watkins                email: dwatkins@glenayre.com
Senior Software Designer        phone: (604) 293-1611 [4534]
Glenayre R&D, Inc.              fax:   (604) 293-4317
1570 Kootenay Street,
Vancouver B.C. Canada V5K 5B8   home:  watkins@cyberstore.ca
                   http://www.glenayre.com
         http://www2.portal.ca/~tyjcom/usr/dwatkins
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