On Sun, 25 Oct 1998, Michael G. Schabert wrote:

> >In principle, NetBSD/mac68k sees a total of 8 (eight) partitions per disk.
> >The others are ignored and are not accessible; the kernel's choice is
> >somewhat less than intuitive, especially if you change, remove and add a
> >few partitions with the MacOS formatter.
> >The whole thing sucks, if you ask me (I know, you haven't ;).
> 
> Actually, to my knowlege, NetBSD sees a total of 12 or 16 partitions (I
> can't remember which). It can't access anything more than 8 NETBSD
> partitions, but it sees the higher ones. So if you had 3 NetBSD, then 6
> MacOS, then 3 more NetBSD, you'd have a total of 12, and NetBSD should (in
> theory) be able to mount them all. But if you had 12 NetBSD partitions, it
> can only use the first 8.
> 
> That's what SHOULD happen.

You were right to emphasize should d:) I only have 7 netbsd partitons
(including swap) but it's only seeing 5 because it's counted the driver
partition and the HFS partition. The actual disk IIRC looks like the
following; also listed is what the Installer saw and what disklabel says
after I installed a minimal 1.3.2 to see if the drive would function w/ an
NCR kernel: 

Partition		Size (kb)	NetBSD sees it as:
----------------------------------------------------------
Driver			      512	sd0d
MacOS (HFS)		  204,800	sd0e
FWB Extended Driver or something 	[doesn't mention it]
NetBSD root		  307,200	sd0a
NetBSD usr #1		  512,000	sd0g
NetBSD usr #2		  512,000	sd0f
NetBSD usr #3		  512,000	sd0h
NetBSD usr #4		 ~150,000	sd0i (Installer only)
NetBSD usr #5		 ~950,000	sd0j (Installer only)
NetBSD swap		   40,960	sd0b

The only thing disklabel says regarding usr partitions 4 & 5 (i & j) is:
disklabel: warning, number of partitions (12) > MAXPARTITIONS (8)
disklabel: warning, partition j: size 0, but offset 1

I'm curious why it thinks there are 12 partitions. Even if you count the
sd0c whole disk partition, I'm only aware of 11; there is nothing beyond the
swap partition. I'm also curious about that size 0 business and the order it
put sd0f,g,h... 

I believe at this point I will condense the first 3 usr partitions (and
possibly the root as well) into a single partition. I'm also considering
moving the HFS partition behind all the NetBSD ones. Although it seems to
mount sd0h with no problems, if I can get the MacOS to the end of the disk
and go with only 3 or 4 NetBSD partitions, I should be able to stay below
sd0h which seems to be most people's advice. As an aside, are there plans to
allow NetBSD to access more partitions? It was probably mentioned before, I
realize; that's what I get for ignoring messages because they didn't apply
to me at the time d:) 

Dave Schmitt <dschmi1@umbc.edu>