by Hola,
I have run into a problem with both openBSD and netBSD when trying to
install on my new Gateway PC -- the disk is an ATA >8GB; here's what I've
done, trying to dual-boot with the existing win95. I'm booting from current
snapshots of both O/Ss (trying to support my bleeding edge hardware after
all).
There was one huge partition. I split it almost in half with fips. All OK.
Now there's two partitions, win95 on number zero, nothing on number one.
openBSD's fdisk couldn't handle the end sector of partition number one,
which is 16434432, said it was out of range, and 'fixed' it by saying the
end is at C/H/S = 2/254/63, or in edit mode, as sector 8401995.
netBSD seemed to handle everything fine, and set up the disklabel and
fsck'd. I stopped before completing the full install, rebooted, and somehow
it had killed the table entry for partition zero (c:\ didn't exist, win95
would not boot through the boot menu). I recovered by using restorrb (part
of fips) to re-write the backup of the boot record.
After reading the openBSD docs on the limitations of the PC BIOS, I'm unsure
of the solution here. My drive is 8-point-something GB, so now what?
Here's what pfdisk says:
geometry 1023 255 63 (cyls heads sectors)
# ID First(cyl) Last(cyl) Name # start, length (sectors)
1 12 0 499 unkno # 63, 8032437
2 12 500 1026 unkno # 8032500, 8466255
# note: last(2): phys=(2,254,63) logical=(1026,254,63)
3 0 0 0 empty # 0, 0
4 0 0 0 empty # 0, 0
active: 1
Here's another issue: why is the win95 partition labelled as Unknown? It
has id 0xC; I expected *BSD to recognize it.
Kudos to those who helped me out on my last install problem. After this, it
gets easier, right?