davagatw@Mars.utm.edU (The Great Mr. Kurtz [David A. Gatwood]) said...

> If I understood the previous post correctly (which is definitely
> possible), the changes would cause it to look for an Apple disklabel and,
> upon failing to find one, use a BSD disklabel, making it compatible with
> both formats.

Exactly.

> Somehow I suspect that using native disklabels would also require a
> NetBSD-side format program to trash the Apple Partition table, if you
> wanted to use BSD disklabels, otherwise the disklabel prog would find the
> Apple table and read from and write to it.  Either that, or I guess you
> could just put a --force_native option for the disklabel command....  That
> could be messy, though.  Thoughts on that, anyone?

Dead simple... 

'disklabel -wr sd2 mo230 "My junk disk"' overwrites block 0 of my 230 MB
magneto-optical with a NetBSD disklabel constructed from the
/etc/disktab entry 'mo230' and names the 'pack' (*BSD diction) "My junk
disk". This entry consists of physical disk parameters as well as
logical partitioning data (see disktab(5)):

sd230|mo230|mo230-iso|Fujitsu M2512A Magneto-optical:\
        :ty=optical:dt=SCSI:\
        :ns#40:nt#8:nc#1394:su#446324:se#512:\
        :pc#446324:oc#0:bc#8192:fc#1024:tc=unused:\
        :pg#446323:og#1:bg#8192:fg#1024:tg=4.2BSD:

'newfs /dev/sd2g' then reads the disklabel data and formats the
partition ('g' in that case) accordingly.
 
> Well, I'm not sure if native disklabels are absolutely necessary for
> floppies, 

On second thought, 'real' wwritten disklabels are not (the other ports'
floppy code fiddles with the in-core label data).

> And PC would probably be comparatively easy, given
> linux's existing code for dealing with MS-DOS hard drives (and maybe
> floppies?).  Thoughts?

Unfortunately, MFM is an entirely different _physical_ format. No way
without register specs for the SWIM...

        hauke


-- 
"It's never straight up and down"  (DEVO)