Allen Briggs <briggs@puma.macbsd.com> wrote:

>NetBSD handles large drives just fine.  I think that some of the MacOS
>tools have had problems in the past with large drives.  I was under the
>impression that the current versions of these tools work fine with large
>drives.

The problem with the *old* MacOS utilities (Mkfs and Installer) was that 
they were using the smaller 6-byte SCSI command buffer which limited them 
to drives smaller than 1Gig. After numerious trashings of my 1.6Gig drive 
I modified Mkfs to support 10-byte SCSI command buffers and Steven Brown 
used the same technique on the Installer. As I recall this happened 
sometime around version 1.2 of Mkfs and version 1.1 of the Installer. I 
haven't seen the disk corruption problem since on my 1.6Gig drive and I 
haven't heard of anyone having corruption problems that were related to 
the size of the command buffer if they used the later versions of these 
utilities (Version 1.45 for Mkfs and version 1.1f for Installer).  I 
never saw any disk corruption (of MacOS partitions) on my large disk 
which I could pin down to NetBSD drivers since they also use the larger 
SCSI command buffers.

FWIW I think the 10-byte SCSI command buffers will handle disks up to 
24Gig in size. After that someone will need to implement the 12-byte 
command format.  I put a note in the Mkfs sources about this, but didn't 
bother to implement the larger command buffers.

-bob