*BSD News Article 27359


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From: kenh@wrl.epi.com (Ken Hornstein)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Can NetBSD-0.9 and DOS get along?
Date: 13 Feb 1994 20:43:47 -0500
Organization: Entropic Research Laboratory, Washington DC
Lines: 65
Message-ID: <2jml0j$o86@sparc10.entropic.com>
References: <dvdjnsCL011x.Juw@netcom.com> <MYCROFT.94Feb11100414@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Reply-To: kenh@wrl.epi.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: sparc10.entropic.com

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.

--Ken