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From: tom@afthree.as.arizona.edu (Thomas J. Trebisky)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: A collection of new install questions
Date: 18 Feb 1994 21:58:02 GMT
Organization: Steward Observatory, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
Lines: 60
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <2k3dla$od4@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: afthree.as.arizona.edu
Well, it finally happened -- a fellow wanted to talk me into doing
some work for him, and part of the deal is that I get (I got!) a 486 cpu
board and I can dump my old 286 -- well, I went out and bought a
shiny new 202M IDE drive (Western Digital AC1210), so last night
I bolted all this together, and took home with me the first 3 install
floppies with NetBSD.
First success is that this machine (Cyrix 486/40 Opti), does boot the
NetBSD-0.9 floppy just fine, with 4M ram and 128k external cache, cool
so far.
First question: where does one get the pfdisk program?? I managed
to use fdisk and Norton Disk Editor to I think get this right, but
pfdisk sounds like a nicer and more sure-fire way to go.
I get stuck tho just at the point in the install procedure after
I copy the kernel to wd0a and go to reboot the machine from the HD
for the first time. I suspect this is the disk geometry remapping
business the FAQ talks about. I just got off the phone with Western
Digital Tech support, they tell me that the *real* drive geometry is
1971 cyl, 4 heads, and variable sectors/track (from 48-56).
They did make statements to the effect that no-one should need to
know this to make the drive work with *any* operating system, but
I take that with a grain of salt.
Second question: how do I deal with this variable sectors/track??
From what I understand, this kind of thing is fairly common in the
IDE drive world. Has anyone managed to get DOS and NetBSD to live
happily together using this drive. If no-one jumps back at me with
an answer, I will probably just try 48spt and see what happens,
even tho that will be giving up almost 20M of capacity.
Just a short diversion to stave off the cries of "Just dump DOS".
That would suit me fine, but the project I am taking on that is paying
for this new machine is a DOS software development job, so I just
cannot do that -- and sometimes other family members like to play
games -- not me, OS hacking is all the entertainment I need.
Third question: right now, the machine always wants to boot NetBSD
even tho I have rerun fdisk and marked the first partition (with DOS)
as the active partition. So, I can boot DOS from floppy and switch
to the C: drive for now, but ultimately one of these boot managers
will help me switch from the DOS sweatshop to the pleasant land of
unix fun and games and back again. I have seen OS-BS mentioned in
this context. How and where do I get this or something like it??
PPS: I have been hacking away cross-compiling NetBSD sources for
some time working on a 680x0 port, this will actually be my first
experience seeing it run, I am eager with anticipation.
PPPS: I anticipate wanting to run NetBSD-current, is it foolish
for me to install 0.9 first and move to current from there? Of
course running current could wreak havoc on my DOS work, but if I
am not mistaken that will buy me the handy mountable dosfs that I
cannot get with 0.9, among other things????
--
Tom Trebisky ttrebisky@as.arizona.edu
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of
something and knowing something. --R. P. Feynman