Subject: Re: Old Mac + big drive = no BSD?
To: Beth Sundheim <beth@110.net>
From: Christopher P. Gill <cpg@scs.howard.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 06/30/1999 22:31:43
On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Beth Sundheim wrote:

> I recently acquired a used 4.3 GB SCSI internal hard drive, which I have
> installed in a disused IIsi, hoping to give this machine new life and to
> create a more capacious NetBSD system than the one I've currently got
> squeezed onto a tiny 80MB hard drive in my Classic II. The hard drive is
> healthy and functional, but too large to be mounted at startup. SCSIProbe
> identifies the drive, but won't mount it; Apple's HD SC Setup, which I used
> to set up my other NetBSD disk, doesn't see the drive at all. Recent
> versions of Drive Setup will happily mount and partition the drive, but it
> warns that the system software won't recognize a disk this size without
> multiple partitions, and furthermore it won't allow any of those partitions
> to be ProDos or A/UX or other non-Macintosh formats. So I'm in a bit of a
> bind.

I'm sorry if I'm hawking elementary solutions here, but is the version of
HD SC Setup the one 'patched' to work with non-Apple drives?  Is the drive
an Apple-'fingerprinted' drive?  It seems as though that's the problem. 
In any case, it sounds as though Drive Setup 1.7.3 (the most recent one, I
think) will format and partition the drive, but probably only gives you
HFS, HFS+, and Unallocated as choices.  That's fine.  The Mkfs utility can
convert from HFS to NetBSD.  I imagine that you won't have any partitions
over 2GB anyway, so you should still be able to mount them under 7.6.1 or
whatever - although you may not *need* to (although Drive Setup will
attempt this once it's finished), since you can go right from Drive Setup
to Mkfs without ever needing to mount the partitions under MacOS.


> I've tried a couple of solutions, including booting the IIsi from external
> disks running various flavors of System 7 (7.1, 7.5.1, 7.5.3, 7.6) with and
> without Pseud040 installed (which I thought might expedite matters); in
> most of these configurations I can get the internal hard drive mounted to
> the desktop, but upon restart I'm always stuck with a flashing question
> mark. Drive Setup maintains that the problem is in a limitation of the
> currently installed system software, but I suspect that 7.6 should be
> perfectly capable of handling a disk of this size, and that the probelm is
> actually elsewhere. Can anyone suggest a workaround--a patch or a clever
> trick which will let my IIsi use this magnificent large disk? I'd be very
> grateful for your insights.

From the above, I'm wondering if you might have SCSI termination problems
when you connect your external drive(s).  BTW, when you run the recent
Drive Setup on the new drive, where/how is it installed/connected, and
where are you booting from and running Drive Setup from?


/*======================================================================
"Don't die wondering..."                http://www.cldc.howard.edu/~cpg
                                              email: cpg@scs.howard.edu
chris out-              Christopher P. Gill
  peace.        C.L.D.C. Senior System Operator (Ret.)
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