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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!hp9000.csc.cuhk.hk!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!headwall.Stanford.EDU!CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU!Xenon.Stanford.EDU!dhess From: dhess@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Drew Hess) Subject: Problems installing NetBSD 0.8 Message-ID: <dhess.744088562@Xenon.Stanford.EDU> Sender: news@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University, California, USA Date: 31 Jul 93 03:16:02 GMT Lines: 71 I'm having a hell of a time installing NetBSD 0.8 on my PC. I'm trying to install it on a Western Digital AC2340 hard drive (1010 cyl, 12 heads, 55 sec/track, 512-byte sectors (? -- pretty sure but not positive)). I want to keep my MS-DOS partition on the drive, but each time I try to install NetBSD I trash this partition. I tried reading the 386BSD/NetBSD FAQ on this subject, but it doesn't really address my questions. I'm ashamed to admit that I'm pretty ignorant on the subject of hard drive partitioning. I told FDISK to create a primary DOS partition that occupies 50% of the drive; this comes out to 170434560 bytes on this drive (reported by CHKDSK). Following the NetBSD install notes, I created another partition (50% again) with intent to install NetBSD 0.8 on this partition. Obviously I didn't create any logical DOS drives on this "extended DOS" partition. Now, I'm pretty sure that there's partitioning information stored somewhere on the drive -- problem is, I have no idea where. (Is this a correct assumption?) Not knowing any better, I decided to leave a little room between my rough calculation of the size of the MS-DOS partition and the offset (beginning) of the NetBSD partition, just to be safe so I didn't mistakenly trash the end of the DOS partition. Well, NetBSD installed just fine, and even booted off the hard drive, but when I booted an MS-DOS system disk, the primary DOS partition was hosed. Luckily, I had used Central Point's DISKFIX to create an emergency disk with a copy of my old partition table, so I as able to recontstruct the primary DOS partition with only a little data loss. (Well, the second time, that is -- the first time I tried this I lost the whole thing and had to reinstall Win3.1 and all my apps.) Needless to say, I couldn't boot MS-DOS off the hard drive, nor could I use FDISK from the system disk to set the primary partition to the active partition (since the primary partition was gone). So, my questions are: 1. what am I doing wrong (something stupid, I know, but bear with me)? 2. how can I calculate the proper offset of the NetBSD partition? I know how to do all the sectors to bytes, sectors to tracks, etc. stuff, I just need to know where exactly the NetBSD partition should begin. 3. the install program advises that the NetBSD partition should begin at a multiple of the sectors/track (660 for this drive); does the offset you enter during NetBSD install have to be the exact offset of the FDISK-created partition, or is it OK to skip over a few sectors until you reach the beginning of the first whole track within this partition? (or are paritions created by FDISK along track boundaries anyways?) 4. once I get NetBSD installed correctly, how do I make the primary DOS partition the active partition again so I can boot DOS? 386BSD has a "-todos" option in its shutdown command, if memory serves, but I couldn't find an equivalent NetBSD mechanism. I installed 386BSD 0.1 on this system many months ago and didn't have any problems getting it on my hard drive, but I can't remember for the life of me why it was so much easier with 386BSD. Normally I would just play around with this until I figured it out, but I'm tired of reformatting and reloading all my MS-DOS stuff. Thanks in advance -dwh- dhess@cs.stanford.edu