Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!dtix.dt.navy.mil!cs.umd.edu!nocusuhs!Pt!postmaster@hq.af.mil!rick From: rick@hq.af.mil Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Subject: NETBSD/386BSD install system Message-ID: <22790@hq.hq.af.mil> Date: 18 May 93 18:14:59 GMT Sender: news@Pt.hq.af.mil Reply-To: rick@hq.af.mil Organization: 7TH Communications Group Lines: 45 I have posted about this before, and the day I did I lost my net news feed. So some of you may have posted follow-ups and I didn't get to read them :-(. I just got my feed back and would like to try again. Thanks for your patience. I recently downloaded the NETBSD 0.8 and I am intent on using it for the basis of a beefed up install system that probes for geometry etc... Some of the problems I have run into though are just exactly how to do this. I looked at the hdattach routines in the autoconfig portions of the mach 3.0 kernel in the hopes of using this as a guideline to probe for drive geometries. It looks to me like they are just trusting the bios. The netBSD install docs warn against UTM type drives and that trusting the bios would lead to disaster. My questions are: 1. How would one go about getting the physical geometry from a hard drive. I have looked up the bios routines to do this and I am not sure whether the bios routines return physical or translated geometry. Guessing-- I would say that if you turn off UTM on the drive and then use the bios to probe for geometry that you will get physical geometry numbers after the probe. T or F 2. Is it possible to turn off UTM in software? Or does it require a jumper fix? Aside from this most all of the rest of the install system is straightforward. Most of it can be done with shell scripts and a couple of tools like diskpart, fdisk, and disklabel etc... If someone else is working on this I would like to know, so that we can compare notes. -- Rick Weldon I-NET Inc. (Pentagon, 7TH Com Group) E-mail: rick@hq.af.mil Phone: 703-695-5060