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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bruce.cs.monash.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!news.kei.com!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!epiwrl.entropic.com!usenet 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