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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!csn!hellgate.utah.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) Subject: Re: [NetBSD] installing with DOS Message-ID: <1993Jun1.214740.8964@fcom.cc.utah.edu> Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT) References: <C7vu5z.EtM@cvt.stuba.cs> <1ud4r6$l80@stimpy.css.itd.umich.edu> Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 21:47:40 GMT Lines: 43 In article <1ud4r6$l80@stimpy.css.itd.umich.edu> altitude@css.itd.umich.edu (Alexander King Tang) writes: >Valo Roman (valo@cvtstu.cvt.stuba.cs) wrote: >: Because when I finished the base installation, my dos partition gone away !!! >: Running fdisk again didn't help, it told me that there isn't enough space to >: create dos partition. > >Hi. I've had the same problem. my disk's geom is 1001cyl, 15 track/cyl, 17 >sec/track, 512 byte/sec. I had a 1 meg dos partition. When I Installed >NetBSD, I did the offset one meg (1024 of the 512 byte sectors), and it asked >to overwrite dos-partition table. I said ok and my dos partition vaporized. >I reinstalled with a 1 meg dos partition but I thought that there might be >more than one meeg in the partition, I counted the bytes used and free in the >partition, and came up with 1.02 meg. I reinstalled NetBSD witha 2 Meg Offset. >I figured that this was enough. Again it asked to overwrite the dos partition >table. I said NO this time. When it was supposed to reboot off the hard >drive, it booted off my dos partition, and the non-dos partition wasn'te even >in fdisk, so I couldn't make it active. I did it again (Take 3) I did 1 meg >dos, 2 meg offset, and ok to overwrite dos partition table. Once again, my >dos partition is gone. What happened???? Thanx..alex... *NO* parttitions accessed by the DOS boot track are allowed to start past the one meg point... *PERIOD*. Your 386BSD/NetBSD partition *MUST* start before the 1M boundry if it is to allow BIOS to load the second stage boot. The install program will only ask if it can overwrite your partition table if it can't find the disklabel/second stage boot (which it can't if the thing starts after 1M). The other reson for "losing" the disklabel at the start of the 386BSD partition is giving it the untranslated rather than the translated geometry during the install. The install requires the translated geometry be used if the translated geometry is used on another partition on the same drive (ie: there's a DOS partition table). If you use the whole drive for 386BSD *AND* you don't use Julian's boot blocks (which are the default for any NetBSD installation), you can use the untranslated geometry during the install - but *only* then. Terry Lambert terry@icarus.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.