Re: Q: MSDOS hard disk partitions and floppies

[Ignatios Souvatzis <is%jocelyn.rhein.de@localhost>]

On Fri, Jan 08, 1999 at 01:26:02PM +0100, Andres Suarez Gonzalez wrote:
> Hi there!
>       I have NetBSD 1.3.2 GENERIC up and running on my Amiga
> 1200-68040/40, installed on an IDE drive. I would like to share data
> with the AmigaOS side through an MSDOS partition (I suppose is the
> only filesystem that NetBSD can write and AmigaOS can read, isn't
> it?).

No: bffs-1.4beta (readonly; I tried that myself) and bffs-1.5 should be able to
read NetBSD's native filesystem format. 1.5 can even write it, last I heard; 
but it will unset the clean flag due to AmigaOSes inability to do real
dismounts, so that you will fsck on the next boot of NetBSD.
You should be able to get one of them through AMINET, I think.

>       1. My first problem is that after defining a 140MB MSDOS
> partition on the AmigaOS side without any trouble (it is seen by both
> PC-Task and AmigaOS), NetBSD still doesn't recognize it. At boot time
> I get the following message twice:
> 
> "warning unknown dostype: 0x4d534800 marking unused"

Thats because "MSH\0" is not in the list of RDB partition types NetBSD
understands.

If this is really a standard (for PCTASK and CrossDOS) RDB partition type,
I'll be happy to add it to the translation table used by NetBSD. Can somebody
please confirm this? (I've only used crossdos on floppy disks).

> and so I am not able to use mount_msdos. Any advice?
> 
>       2. I have tried to share data through floppy disks with Mtools
> (Gateway CD package distribution), but with any of its commands (when
> a MSDOS 720KB disk is already inserted) I get the following message
> (BTW, the same message appears several times at boot time):
> 
> "fd0: corrupted track (0) data"

I strongly suspect you used /dev/rfd0a, which en/decodes Amiga floppy track
format. You should use /dev/rfd0b which en/decodes "IBM" floppy track format.
For details: "man 4 fdc"

> If I am not able to use Mtools on floppy disks, I suppose it won't work
> with hard disk partitions either (I haven't tried it).

Try it. It should work.

Regards,
        -is