[Note to yellowstone: It may be that my problem with partitions could be
solved if the ATAFS were to check each bootblock it comes across, and only
try to assign RiscOS drives to those which were actually RiscOS
bootblocks, rather than finding the RiscBSD bootblock and trying to act on
it, which is what is seems to do at the moment.]

Well, I've been doing some further experimentation, and I find that
bb_riscbsd is not happy to coexist with ATAFS sharing a hard drive.

I am trying to have two partitions on a drive, the first being 7223
cylinders for RiscOS, the second being the remaining 7625 cylinders for
RiscBSD. I can partition the drive using Yellowstone's software,
allocating the first partition, then either leaving the rest unallocated
or creating a second partition (the problem is the same either way).

I now have to run bb_riscbsd (not doing so results in the install kernel
not being able to find the filesystems, or something - it throws up huge
quantities of errors at the stage when it tries to copy stuff into /usr),
and this is where the problem lies. From now on, when I reboot the
machine, I get a 'disc not found' error from the filing system, and am
dumped back into the desktop without access to my hard drives. To get them
back, I have to repartition the drive with the RiscBSD partition on,
undoing the work of bb_riscbsd in the process. If I do not create another
partition which covers the start of the RiscBSD partition, the problem
remains (because the bootblock created by bb_riscbsd is still there?); the
only way to restore my drives to RiscOS is to delete just the information
which is required to let RiscBSD find the partition. 

Can someone who is using RiscBSD on a shared drive under ATAFS please tell
me how to deal with this? Or is it not possible? (If this is the case, I
guess I'll have to shift all my RiscOS stuff onto the 4.3Gb drive, and use
the whole of the old 850Mb one for RiscBSD. I'm loathe to do this though,
since the old drive is so slow, which will cripple RiscBSD much more than
it does RiscOS. And I want more space than that for RiscBSD...).

I still have the problem of 'wdc_atapi_intr: warning: reading only 0 of
2048 bytes' when I try to list the sets on the CD too :( :( :( which means
I can't install the sets (unless someone can tell me how else to get them
across ... could I just copy all the files in the distrib directory on the
CD into /usr/distrib and install them from there, or something?)

Cheers, and still looking forward to the magical moment when I can do a
multiuser boot with a standard kernel .....

Bill