*BSD News Article 48714


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From: curt@cynic.portal.ca (Curt Sampson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Can't get it to install
Date: 16 Aug 1995 00:55:21 GMT
Organization: Internet Portal Services, Ltd.
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <40rflp$8ud@wolfe.wimsey.com>
References: <40mmfi$sa4@noc.tor.hookup.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cynic.portal.ca

In article <40mmfi$sa4@noc.tor.hookup.net>,
Dan Murray <benton@noc.tor.hookup.net> wrote:

>Why does it need to be so difficult?

Because the large majority of types of machines out there do not
use an extra partitioning scheme for multiple operating systems,
NetBSD has to build this into the file system. If you dedicate a
disk to NetBSD you'll find everything quite simple. If you need to
put a set of NetBSD partitions within a set of IBM-PC partitions,
things get more difficult.

>1. OS/2  / Win95 partition
>2. partition 
>3. desired BSD partition
>4. boot manager partition (perishable)
>5. swap partition (but BSD cannot see this partition!)

Something is very wrong here, since I assume you are talking about
IBM-PC partitions. An IBM-PC disk can have only four partitions on
it, so I don't know where you get the fifth one from.

Linux uses a separate IBM-PC partition for its swap space. This is
not only a waste of a partition, but will no doubt cause interesting
problems when Linux is ported to other architectures that don't use
the IBM-PC partitioning scheme to allow for multiple OSs. Your swap
space is in the IBM-PC BSD partition, and is BSD partition `b'.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.