Over the past week I installed NetBSD 1.3 and compiled a boatload of
add-on user programs and daemons. Over the past couple days I configured
most of the daemons, and set up accounts for my friends here at school.
Everything, as of a couple of hours ago, was hunky-dory.

I decided all that was left for me do was build a custom kernel. But I
didn't have enough disk space on my NetBSD drive, and I had an external
HFS drive laying around... so I figured it give it a reformat, partition
it, and run Mkfs to give myself some play space.

Fair enough: so I shut down my Power Mac, switched the monitor, keyboard,
and mouse to the IIci, and booted up on the small Mac OS partition at the
end of my main NetBSD drive. I ran HD SC Setup on the external drive, and
all looked well... but when it was finishing up the format/partition, the
system froze. Strange, I thought, and rebooted.

Or tried to, at least. After the customary "ding", I got the dreaded
blinking question mark; for some reason, my internal drive's Mac OS
partition was not booting. I cooked up a System 7 boot floppy and added HD
SC Setup, booted from the floppy, and re-reformatted the external drive.
This time it formatted OK -- no freezing. But the internal drive's Mac OS
partition was still not showing up, let alone booting. So I grabbed a copy
of SCSIProbe, which forced the recalcitrant partition to mount... but
still it wouldn't boot.

Finally I said "to hell with it" and copied the Booter and the System
Folder to the external (still HFS, but freshly so) drive, and booted from
there. Then I had crazyslow freezing logins, and realized that I had to
disable the serial console in /etc/ttys since the Power Mac was not on...
and finally, after much ado, I got back up into multiuser. (Incidentally,
I tried afterstep and fvwm95 in 640x480x1 on intvid -- cool, but not very
useful.)

But the little Mac OS partition at the end of the NetBSD drive still won't
boot when I power up.

It's extremely late as I write this, and I don't have access to a
networked Mac until the morning, so I thought I'd just vent a little. The
next step in my plan is to download the System 7 install disks from Apple,
reinstall System 7 on that Mac partition, and see if that doesn't set the
necessary bit so it can boot as before.

(BTW, I looked around for 'fdisk', since it would have done the trick.
There's a man page, but no actual 'fdisk' program. Does this mean that not
enough is known yet to get fdisk working with mac68k?)

-- 
Amitai Schlair
amitai.schlair@usa.net
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