Dan McMahill wrote:
> 
> I would like to be able to access the netbsd USR
> partition (the only netbsd partition) on a zip
> drive which is attached to a NetBSD-less mac.
> The idea is to use a mac attached to a fast network
> connection to download stuff, use the installer to
> copy to the zip drive, then take it home and just
> be able to mount the drive from netbsd.
> 
> right now the installer says something like "no root
> partition, fatal error"
> 
> Any thoughts?  Is there something fundamental about the
> file system which prevents this from working?

I'm fairly sure that the Installer requires a root partition to exist on
some drive that it can mount.  Without it, you just can't access the
filesystem (quite annoying, I know).  You could partition out a minimal
root partition (maybe 1MB?), run mkfs on it, and then use the Installer to
build devices on it, then mount the other partition from within the
Installer.  Of course, you could also just put a Root&Usr type partition
on the zip, and then the installer should be perfectly happy, and so
should NetBSD.

I hope this helps some.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.