If you dig up an old enough old enough version of the MacOS, you might be
able to build a bootable floppy with the loader on it - I used to do that
on my SE/30 NetBSD box - it was my simple solution for dual-booting, pop
the floppy in for BSD, pop it out for MacOS. But there's no real reason to
have MacOS there except that you'll probably have a hard time actually
installing NetBSD without all the files & utilities on your hard drive.
Maybe you could do that on one partition, and then once you had it
running, reformat that partition & add it to your fstab? 

I dunno - if I was your mac, I'd be offended at the suggestion 8-)

-Avram

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Manuel Arriaga wrote:

> Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 21:01:42 GMT
> From: Manuel Arriaga <m.arriaga@ip.pt>
> To: port-mac68k@netbsd.org
> Subject: newbie - do I *really* need to have MacOS installed on my Mac?
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I wish to install NetBSD on my LC630 (it actually is a Quadra630, since it has the 68040 "FPU-complete" CPU).
> 
> But there is something I'm still not sure about: do I really need to keep MacOS around?
> 
> The 1.42 install-notes say:
> 
> Keep in mind that NetBSD currently requires MacOS in order to boot, so it is likely that you will want to keep at least a
> minimal install of MacOS around on an HFS partition for this purpose. The size of this partition may vary depending on the
> size requirements for the version of MacOS you are using. Of course, if you have MacOS on another hard drive or can boot
> from a floppy, feel free to dedicate the entire drive to NetBSD. 
> 
> The FAQ says:
> 
> 4.4 Do I have to have a MacOS partition?
> No. If the partitioning software allows it, you can allocate all space on a drive to BSD partitions. Note, this drive will
> not show up on your desktop. Therefore you will need the booter either on a bootable floppy or on a MacOS partition on another
> drive.
> 
> 
> So, even if I dedicate my entire internal harddrive to Netbsd, I will still have to boot from another medium on which MacOS
> is installed, right? Or has this changed in the mean time? 
> 
> Is there any other way in which I can "instruct" my Mac to boot directly into NetBSD? Can't I just have my Mac run NetBSD
> as its "primary" OS? Is there any way in which I can circumvent MacOS altogether, at least when booting?
> 
> Thank you for any help,
> 
> Manuel
> 
>