Return to BSD News archive
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!caen!umeecs!niagara.eecs.umich.edu!khushro From: khushro@niagara.eecs.umich.edu (Khushro Shahookar) Subject: Re: Problems installing NetBSD to coexist with DOS. Message-ID: <1993Apr23.025247.17483@zip.eecs.umich.edu> Sender: news@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Mr. News) Reply-To: khushro@niagara.eecs.umich.edu (Khushro Shahookar) Organization: University of Michigan Engineering, Ann Arbor References: <1627@rook.ukc.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1993 02:52:47 GMT Lines: 42 > As described in the NetBSD documentation I ran the FDISK program to do > the repartition. The first partition I created was a 120Mb primary DOS > partition. What do I do now? I created an extended DOS partition of > 114Mb (the rest of the disk) for NetBSD. I figured that I had to > create a real partition just to have something in the DOS partition > table. > > The NetBSD install notes tell me to remember the start sector and > length, as given by FDISK. I haven't managed to get FDISK to tell me > these. It just says how big the partitions are (in Mb). > > I used Norton's 'System Info' to tell me the partition addresses. But > then when I took the start side/tracK/sector and end side/track/sector > and multiplied it out by the disk geometry (722 cyl, 13 sides, 51 spt) > the numbers did't equal the reported partition size. > > I played around with the numbers and found a start sector number which > I think didn't hit the DOS partition. I gave these to the NetBSD > install program and the install started. > > At the point where the disklabel happens, it said: > > "Overwriting disk with DOS partition table? (n):" Yes, this part of the NetBSD install notes was confusing for me also. It does not clarify whether we need to create a DOS/non-DOS partition in the space we want to reserve for NetBSD or not. Besides, there does not seem to be an easy way to get the size/offset for this partiton. Tiny 386BSD does all this automatically on any unused portion of the disk, and it should not be hard to modify the tinyBSD boot program to ask for a size in Mbytes like DOS fdisk does. I was lucky I already had a DOS partition created by fdisk, another partition created by tinyBSD, and I could get the size/offset and disk geometry from 386BSD before loading NetBSD. The rest of the NetBSD setup process is great. -- Copyright KHUSHRO SHAHOOKAR, $0.02 khushro@eecs.umich.edu Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor