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From: bmb1@stirling.ac.uk (Mr Brian M Bullen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: [NetBSD] installing with DOS
Date: 1 Jul 1993 16:53:19 GMT
Organization: University of Stirling
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <20v4pv$c22@lorne.stir.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: lorne.stir.ac.uk
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In article <1uvm7l$mdt@lucy.ee.und.ac.za>,
barrett@lucy.ee.und.ac.za (Alan Barrett) writes:
> This sort of problem happens when you try to install NetBSD in a
> partition of a disk whose controller does geometry translation.
> One option is to disable the geometry translation:
> use the CMOS setup program to tell your BIOS about the true
> geometry, and reformat everything.
Unfortunately DOS has limits on the numbers it can work with -
Can it really go above 17 sectors ?
I have a 1251 cyl, 4 head, 41 sector NEC D3755 disk (IDE - 100 Meg)
I used the CMOS to initialize as 625 cyl, 8 head, 41 sectors -- thinking
the critical item would be sectors per track.
I installed NETBSD after setting the partition ID to 165 on the second
partition - on booting I got:
warning: no swap space present (yet)
swapinfo said that 'wd0 was not initialized for swap'
Disklabel correctly reported the data apparently written in the second sector of
the 386bsd partition as configured in the dos partition table
( I checked using dd of those sectors from rwd0a and rwd0d)
I did find that the wdboot on the netbsd distribution is broken, and
had to used that from the install1 floppy.
> If you are not able to, or do not wish to, disable the geometry
> translation then the following workaround might work for you. This
> requires that the disk have unused space on {cylinder 0, head 0}, from
> sector 2 to sector 16.
I followed the instructions and all is OK - but I am intrigued ,
why did NetBSD find it's root disk and run, but could not find it's
swap device. A first look at the source indicated there may be more than
one place that the disklabel info is processed.