On Wed, 10 Jan 1996, Kelly Campbell wrote:
> I've had the darndest time adding another external disk the last two days.
> My basic problem was that I couldn't partition it like I wanted to. I tried
> everything I knew to do with disklabel, the disktab file, etc. Nothing would 
> work. I could write a label to the drive, but that label just would never
> get loaded into the kernel's in-core copy like the man pages said it should.

I had similar problems.  Finally, I wrote my own disktab file, wrote a 
disklabel and ran newfs on the drive.  I too tried to write to "c".  I 
wound up with a "custom" geometry--i.e. one that didn't work perfectly.  
I could only get 62MB out of the 80MB drive.  This was probably due to 
"imperfections" in my disktab entry.

The best advice I got was to re-format the drive and repartition it using 
APS, but calling it a USR partition.  I did that, ran makefs (MACOS util) 
on it, and was able to mount it from with NetBSD with a simple:

mount /dev/sd1g /opt 

It behaves fine now.  I'm not sure that I like this solution because it 
forces me to use the MacOS side of things, where appropriate UN*X utils 
exist; however, it works and is painless.

> One other thing I noticed while trying to figure this problem out is that
> sdXc has to be the whole drive, and this is hard coded into NetBSD, so if
> you try to set up custom partitions, make sure that you keep c as the whole
> drive.

This was another lesson to me. . . .it explains why I managed to wipe out 
my entire 540MB drive while trying to add a 150MB "free slice 3" to an 
existing ROOT & USR (100MB) and MacOS (250MB) drive.  Wrote the disktab, 
ran newfs unsuccessfully on /dev/sd0c and got the blinking diskette when 
I rebooted ;-)

Duh, time to start over--but I needed to go from NetBSD 1.0 to 1.1 anyhow.

This stuff should go in the FAQ, since it's a bit peculiar to some UN*X 
users, I would think.  Particularly the bits about AUX filesystems. 
Though I did read:

  "The c partition often refers to the entire disk as a whole, including 
   areas that should be accessed only by the kernel (such as the
   partition information at the beginning of the drive).  Thus, on most
   BSD-based systems, the c partition is never used in commands."

In the O'Reilly Essential System Administration book.

Well, verbiage grows to fill the page and I must apologize.

Adam

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Adam Nicol Delu                                              Omnes-Houston
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