*BSD News Article 6741


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!mcsun!sunic!psinntp!psinntp!fstalb!mooreb
From: mooreb@fac.com (Brian Moore)
Subject: Re: DOS and 386BSD (and NT and OS2)
Organization: First Albany Corp.
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1992 08:45:25 GMT
Message-ID: <1992Oct17.084525.1492@fac.com>
References: <92288.123610K390670@ALIJKU11.BITNET> <1992Oct15.025722.15943@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1992Oct16.184032.29680@fac.com>
Lines: 53

In article <1992Oct16.184032.29680@fac.com> mooreb@fac.com (Brian Moore) writes:
some stuff deleted
>
>I recently purchased the same 212MB Conner drive and got it working with
>DOS first and real partitioning fairly easily.  Here goes my description,
>feel free to tell me that my setup can't possibly work, or thank me for
>posting a working solution...

OK, here's the official info...

I set the drive up in CMOS with 683 cylinders, 16 heads, 38 sectors, 0
pre-comp, and 386 landing-zone, all as specified by Conner tech support
when I told them I wanted DOS to see the whole thing.  According to the
spec sheet, it really has 1366 cylinders and 8 heads.

Fdisk was happy with this, it reported 202MB on the disk.  I created a
15 MB DOS partition which another partitioning utility showed used
cylinders 0 through 50.

I then installed 386bsd using the dist.fs just to get a basis for a
disklabel.  The system could reboot using the hard drive at this point,
which suprised me because I've heard a lot here about having to compile
the boot code when running with a DOS partition first.  I shut down and
looked at the disklabel using fixit.fs, then created the following:

cp3204f|Conner 200MB IDE:\
	:dt=ESDI:ty=winchester:se#512:nt#16:ns#38:nc#683: \
	:pa#352640:oa#31008:ta=4.2BSD:ba#4096:fa#512: \
	:pb#30000:ob#383848:tb=swap: \
	:pc#383040:oc#31008:

Note that it also defines 683 cylinders.  I wrote the disklabel, installed
bin01, and things ran.  I had to add the swap partition to /etc/fstab,
which is understandable, but I thought it strange I never saw it mentioned
here before.  I also had to make a few guesses about the proper spacing of
the partitions, but it seemed to work when all was done.  Anyone know
where I can find some decent info on partitioning disks?  For example
is there anything that wells why all the sample disktab entries end
the swap partition 500 sectors before the end of a cylinder boundry (as
far as I can recall)?

And last, I installed os-bs to be able to boot either system.  

Any comments?  Try this out and let me know how it works.

BTW, in the process of all this, I tried "fdisk /mbr" from MS-DOS 5.0, and
could never get it to clean out the master boot record.  At some point
I tried MS-DOS 4.01 and it worked.  Can anyone verify this behavior?
-- 
Brian Moore, mooreb@fac.com | "Buddha once sat before a wall, and when he
Unix System Administrator   | arose he was enlightened." / "You compare
First Albany Corporation    | yourself to Buddha?" / "No, only to the wall."
standard disclaimers apply  |                               - Circle of Iron