*BSD News Article 16768


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu!ns1.nodak.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!usenet.coe.montana.edu!decwrl!concert!gatech!
 howland.reston.ans.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!news.byu.edu!cwis.isu.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: [NetBSD] installing with DOS
Message-ID: <1993Jun2.205119.995@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 20:51:19 GMT
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
References: <1ud4r6$l80@stimpy.css.itd.umich.edu> <1993Jun1.214740.8964@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1993Jun2.095924.68884@cc.usu.edu>
Organization: Weber State University  (Ogden, UT)
Lines: 27

In article <1993Jun2.095924.68884@cc.usu.edu> ivie@cc.usu.edu writes:
>In article <1993Jun1.214740.8964@fcom.cc.utah.edu>, terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
>> 
>> *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.
>
>What 1M boundary? We're talking _disk_ here, not _memory_.

Uh... 1M of 1K bytes... yeah, yeah, that's the ticket.  8-).

This should have been "1G boundry", or even more correctly, if one is not
using a translated drive, "the 10 bit cylinder maximum".  You can't put
BIOS accessed information (like the stage 2 boot from Julians boot blocks
which come with NetBSD, or the NetBSD disklabel) outside of the accessable
range for the BIOS access of the disk.  So if I have a 5G disk, the 386BSD
partition (or NetBSD) *must* start in the first 1024 cylinders anyway...
and the full disklabel and second stage boot must reside entirely below
the 1025th cylinder, period.  Generally, drives that large are translated
for DOS to use the maximum possible area -- 1G.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.