Hello all,

  This is general info for people with or planning on getting large harddisks.
As large disks drop in price Mac and old Mac disks fail (as mine did), many of
you may get 500MB or larger disks.  MacOS has a "problem" with these large
disks.  MacOS seems to want to devide the space on a disk (or partion) into
65,536 equally sized chunks.  It will then parcel these chunks out to files
as they need more space.  This leads to an anoying situation where a 100 byte
file may occupy 3.5K of disk space.  The fix to this I'm told is to partion
the disk.  I did and it fixes the problem some what while introducing the
anoyance of not being abel to move files accross partions, they must be copied
and the origonal deleted.  I was very carfull to limit my self to only 8
partions (or so I thought).
  When I discovered MacBSD, I took the last three partions and made them my
/ & /usr, and swap partions.  Thus reducing my total partions to 7 (or so
I thought).  MacBSD would boot but could not find the swap partion.
  The needed clue came when Sam responded with this message

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I sent this out before, but it didn't seem to get out...

  I know this is getting redundant but I've lost or discarded the info
  on where a "GOOD" Format/Partioning tool is on the net for the Mac.
  It looks like I may need it to fix my swap problem.

It's pretty easy to modify Apple's HD SC Setup disk formatter/
partitioner to work with arbitrary drives.  With ResEdit, open the
CODE resource named %A5Init, page down to the list of drives, and zero
out the second byte before the first letter (of "SEAGATE"...).

This may not be a "good" format/partitioning tool, but it works and is
fairly easy to use.

Sam
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Thanks Sam.

  The Apple HD SC Setup showed me that there were two additional partitions
on the disk that non of the other formatters told me about.  They were
the partion table itself, and a MacOS boot partion.  This meant that my swap
partion was at partion 8 (beyond the 0-7 range I was trying to stay within).
  I have fixed my imediate problem by removeing an almost unused MacOS partion
and giving it to MacBSD.

  I hope this will help people in the future.

????
  Is there a possible fix for this problem in MacBSD?  It seems to me that
at some point during the boot phase a logical to physical mapping of the
drive partions must occur.  I saw this because my partion 6 shows up as 
MacBSD partion a: and 7 as b:.  It seems as though disklabel and the mapping
process only look at upto the first 8 tabel entries.  Could this me fixed
to look at the entire tabel and stop when either there are no more enties
in the partion table of the disk or unix?

PS. I am still tring to get my printer to work correctly.  It was suggested
earlier that the serial driver may need some work.  I would like to take a
look at it.  Any suggestions, pointers, were is it (I just got ksrc.tar.gz
today)?

Thanks much, Kevin

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