Install script problems in 2.3 on Intel

[Monty Brandenberg <montyb_(_at_)_jaxom_(_dot_)_eng_(_dot_)_pko_(_dot_)_dec_(_dot_)_com>]

OpenBSD 2.3 is to be installed on a 9.1GB disk with three primary
partitions (FAT16 for NT, OS/2 for PartitionMagic, Unformatted for
OpenBSD or NextStep) and an extended partition with four logical
partitions (Linux ext2, linux swap, linux ext2, and unformatted
for openbsd or other).  Several problems of varying severity 
arise when fdisk starts:

    .	Because of the existing partition structure, fdisk prints
	quite a bit of information out on startup.  This scrolls
	away instructions and some of the partition info.  Perhaps
	the console code actually has a scroll buffer that can be
	paged and I just don't know how to use it yet.

    .	Fdisk's handing of logical partitions is somewhat unintuitive.
	In my case, to view the last linux ext2 partition I need
	to do 'select 3', 'select 1', 'select 1', 'select 1' giving
	a 4-deep session requiring four 'exit' commands to finish.
	It would seem to be more intuitive to just deal with this
	as a two-level hierarchy:

		0:  FAT16
		1:  OS/2
		2:  Unformatted
		3:  Extended
			4:  Ext2
			5:  Linux swap
			6:  Ext2
			7:  Unformatted

    .	Because I had already formatted the disk and the instructions
	had scrolled off, on my first run I simply exited fdisk to
	proceed to disklabel.  This meant that no partition had been
	marked as 'A6' for OpenBSD.  When disklabel then did it's 
	business, it seemed to default to parition 0 (FAT16 for NT)
	and wrote the disklabel on some sectors.  This munged some
	partition info on the disk but I was able to boot and use
	partition magic to fix up the ID's and all systems were
	bootable.  I would say that if no partition is marked A6,
	install shouldn't proceed to disklabel.  Also, we could have
	multiple Openbsd partitions.  In this case, install might
	prompt for the one to use as the target and communicate
	this to disklabel for useful defaults.

After the above problems, I used partition magic to label the
third primary partition as 'A6' and then booted the CD and proceeded
through the full install to the disklabel step.  This is relatively
straight forward but two things arise:

    .	When using a primary or logical partition to contain an
	OpenBSD system should a sector or even a full cylinder be
	reserved at the beginning of the partition for the OpenBSD
	disklabel?  For that matter, where does the disklabel reside
	under the possible partitioning scenarios?  I didn't know
	so when I created my disklabel partitions, I started them
	at the very beginning of the third primary and it seemed to
	work.  MBR/primary 0 appeared to be undamaged when I was
	finished.

    .	The heuristic code in disklabel that calculates likely values
	when creating partitions seems to have a few problems.  This
	third primary partition has 4,112,640 sectors.  I created
	a, b, and h partitions:

		a:	4,128,705	385,497
		b:	4,514,202	256,977
		h:	4,771,179	3,470,165

	For h, it computed a size of 3,470,229 which is 64 sectors (one
	logical cylinder's worth) more than I had left in the partition.
	To see what would happen, I accepted this and it then reported
	that only 3,470,165 were available.


--
Monty Brandenberg                                      Consulting for:
MCB, Inc.                                              Digital Equipment Corp.
45 Putnam Avenue           mcbinc_(_at_)_world_(_dot_)_std_(_dot_)_com        montyb_(_at_)_eng_(_dot_)_pko_(_dot_)_dec_(_dot_)_com
Cambridge, MA 02139        617.864.6907                978.493.2702