This is a collection of reminders about things to take care of on NetBSD systems. If they are here it is likely that it is something I keep on forgetting and need to dig up again.
The boot stuff was disassociated from the disklabel and partition information. You need to run installboot to make a new disk bootable.
The NetBSD disklabel is at the start of the NetBSD portion of the disk. In other words, the "C" partition. Don't install the disklabel at the beginning of the physical disk, it can be wiped by other things.
The NetBSD disklabel uses physical offsets on the disk, not relative to the NetBSD partition. This is great if your NetBSD partition isn't whole.
My FORTH partition maker is the thing which lets me split the disk NetBSD wise, yet still have the space allocated in an extended partition so that it won't be re-allocated by other operating systems.
Most OSses on PCs keep themselves out of the first track of the disk (for example, starting at offset 63) to leave space for a >1 sector boot loader. If you want cylinder-aligned filesystems, you'll need to fix that. On newer disks, unfortunately, that can be a lot of unused disk space. You could use it for a small DOS/FAT partition to hold system and hardware maintenance tools. Which is what DOS was intended for (to boot a real OS) in the first place!
On PCs with MBR labels, the "d" partition is the entire disk.
The netbsd "C" partition should map the entire NetBSD MBR partition. If the NetBSD segment of the disk isn't contiguous (boot issues), it should map the "A" partition. Or perhaps, the disk from the start of the "C" partition to the end of the last NetBSD partition.
To write CDs, cdrecord dev=/dev/cdNd file.iso
works just fine.
No need to use the dev= numbers that cdrecord likes!
NetBSD-1.5 ... SuperProbe doesn't work, fails console open.
SuperProbe has been replaced with X -configure.
The NetBSD-3.1 CD/ISO image has a broken misc.tgz -- you'll need to download it seperately and do a partial install of it.
The NetBSD-3.1 system installer is sorta goofy, it always tries to do things its own way, which previous installers didn't. If re-doing an install, it will often screw up the partition badly, it doesn't understand starting a partition where the previous ended. You end up having to re-do all partitions.
NetBSD-3.1 installer again. If you do a partial install, it keeps track of that, then only re-installs those packages. So, if you want to reinstall some other, or all packages, you need to specify a "full" install, then go re-add all the packages.
The NetBSD package system is far easier to use than Linux RPMs. Dependencies are taken care of, packages can be regenerated easily, etc. Also there is a lot less magic in the package guts, so you can see what is in the package without RPM tools.