*BSD News Article 27284


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr)
Subject: Re: Can NetBSD-0.9 and DOS get along?
Message-ID: <hastyCL7K7p.CCv@netcom.com>
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
References: <dvdjnsCL011x.Juw@netcom.com> <MYCROFT.94Feb11100414@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <2jml0j$o86@sparc10.entropic.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 09:40:37 GMT
Lines: 79

In article <2jml0j$o86@sparc10.entropic.com> kenh@wrl.epi.com writes:
>In article <MYCROFT.94Feb11100414@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu>,
>Charles Hannum <mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>>In article <dvdjnsCL011x.Juw@netcom.com> dvdjns@netcom.com (David
>>Jones) writes:
>>
>>   If the SCSI card is on the system I can't boot the kernel copy
>>   floppy.
>>
>>You haven't said what happens when you try to boot it.
>>
>>I use a 1542B and various SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 devices on my (i386)
>>development box, and it has always worked dandy.  On other machines, I
>>have DOS, NT, and NetBSD all peacefully coexisting.  This is not at
>>all difficult to do.
>
>I respectfully disagree.  I don't think it's easy at all the first time.
>Everyone I know that has tried it (including me) has trashed their partition
>table.
>
>The main stumbling blocks I ran into were the following:
>
>- When you use DOS's FDISK to parition your disk, there's no way to find out
>  the exact geometry of the paritions; all FDISK reports is percentages and
>  megabytes.  I was using the DOS 5 FDISK; I believe someone reported that
>  earlier versions of DOS had FDISKs that reported exact parition geometries.
>  This may be the case, but at the time I couldn't find a single persion that
>  had an earlier copy of DOS; they were all DOS 5 and up.  So I couldn't even
>  find the parition geometry that the installation instructions wanted.
>
>- The line "you must then use a parition editor to mark your NetBSD parition
>  as numeric type 165" is a gross oversimplication!  First off, I'm pretty
>  ignorant of DOS tools; I freely admit it.  I couldn't _find_ a parition
>  editor.  FDISK certainly didn't do it, and I didn't find any other DOS
>  utilities that did what I needed.  A friend of mine tried doing this with
>  one of the Norton utilities, but he said this didn't work either.  (He
>  quite possibly could have done it wrong; I am just reporting what he told
>  me).  Finally, after dredging through the FAQ, I discover a reference to
>  pfdisk.  "Ah-ha!" I said to myself, "no doubt the NetBSD team has put a
>  copy of pfdisk on their ftp site!"  Well, they didn't.  Archie soon showed
>  a copy of pfdisk available ... from the Linux distribution.  Well, I snagged
>  it, and once again I was in business; this solved both the parition geometry
>  problem and the parition editor problem.
>
>A totally unrelated nit - I couldn't create more than 4 filesystems on a NetBSD
>parition during the installation process.  I could do it by hand, but if I
>tried to do it via the installation program I got the message "bad magic
>number" when the filesystems were mounted.  But if I newfs the same filesystems
>myself, I could mount them fine.  Go figure.
>
>First off, I don't want to seem ungrateful; I realized the NetBSD team has
>worked very hard, and I'm sure all of the users out here appreciate it (I know
>I do).  And I will admit that installating NetBSD on a disk so it co-exists
>with DOS is easy ... _once you know how_.  It's figuring it out that's the
>tough part :-)
>
>I realize that perhaps the core team don't have free machines available to test
>the installation procedure; therefore, I hereby offer my machine as a test
>for the 1.0 installation procedure, whenever that is going to happen.  It
>hasn't actually arrived, but it should be here on Wednesday of this week.  So
>if there is work going on for the 1.0 installation (I subscribed to the
>tech-install list, but I haven't seen much on it), please feel free to contact
>me.


Someone should smooth the installation process to co-exist with DOS :-)

There were  several postings on comp.os.386bsd.development related to
this problem. I think the thread's subject is pfdisk...

	Amancio


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