Subject: Getting mac68k drives working on a macppc machine...
To: None <port-macppc@netbsd.org, port-mac68k@netbsd.org>
From: gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 09/16/1999 20:00:36
So, I've got these two, old external hard drives that were once on my
Performa 636 running NetBSD/mac68k 1.3.1. They've got a lot of files
that I want into, but I don't have any 68k macs floating around
nearby.

I *do* have my current ppc machine (the one I'm typing this on,
actually, albeit sshed from a Sun E450), a 7500 running NetBSD/macppc
1.4.1.

I would like to connect these SCSI drives to the (MESH) external SCSI
adapter on my PPC and mount them at, say, /oldmachinename. Didn't
think this would be a problem... but I started to have concerns when I
saw that the macppc port uses a munged Apple partition map to manage
booting via Open Firmware... then again, these things are just SCSI
2 drives with ffs file systems... right? I mean, it's not like I want
to boot off of them, why do their (unused) Apple partition maps even
come into it?

Well, when I actually plugged them in, I got all kinds of errors. I
think a big part of that was that the external SCSI chain gets
addressed before the internal one, meaning that this external drive
was at sd0, my (internal) macos drive at sd1, and my NetBSD/macppc
drive at sd2... which utterly messes up its fstab expectations. Even
after fixing the fstab, I couldn't manage to get the drive mounted,
though I'll admit I wasn't incredibly persistant.

In hindsight, I realized that the external drive was at SCSI ID 1,
same as the internal, NetBSD boot drive, but this shouldn't matter as
the 7500 motherboard has separate SCSI chains for the external and
internal chains. (Anyway, if it were a SCSI ID conflict, I'd have
gotten problems long before getting to assignation of device names.)

So my question is, is it possible to mount these ex-mac68k drives on
my macppc machine? Has anyone done so? If so, how? If no one's tried,
but it should theoretically be possible, what's my next step? No, I
wouldn't like to just reformat the drives - I want the data that's on
them. (If it comes to it, I guess I can give in, find a 68k mac, boot
on it on the network here at swarthmore.edu, tar the two drives up -
total of about 750 MBs - and transfer them to the new machine, but
that's a terrible pain.)

Any help greatly appreciated...

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net