[1784] in NetBSD-Development
Re: Disk partitioning problems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Sep 9 11:09:20 1998
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 11:09:03 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Cc: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[1782] in NetBSD-Development"
> From talking to Karl, I think I mostly understand under what
> conditions the install will leave the hard disk in an unbootable
> state:
[...]
> * When there is not a valid MBR. This was probably the case
> with Alexis's machine.
> In the second case, fdisk will construct an MBR with a NetBSD
> partition overlapping the MBR, and you're basically back in the
> first case.
Well, this was an interesting theory, but fdisk in NetBSD 1.3.x should
construct an MBR with a NetBSD partition starting one track in, and it
seems to do so when I test it. (I did test on a wd disk, though, and
I think the affected machines have been SCSI systems.)
So we're back in the investigation phase. The partition table Karl
showed me on one affected machine had the NetBSD partition in the last
slot, so the install script probably didn't make it (it would have
chosen the first slot). It was presumably made by fdisk or disklabel
or something else NetBSD, but I don't know what.
