Daniel Parks wrote:

>> > First thing: How do I format a drive from within NetBSD?
>
>I believe newfs will do the trick, if you just want to format.
>
>> At the moment, you can't, unless some bright soul has come up with a tool
>> very recently. You need to use Apple HD SC Setup (and in particular a
>> patched version if the drive is not Apple-branded).
>
>Or pdisk from Bob's website... for some reason no one seems to agree with
>me that pdisk was the greatest disk partitioner ever made. Oh well.
>
Pdisk is really low-level and all it does is allow one to mung up the 
Partition Map.  It's a bit like using a large rock to take the lug nuts 
off a wheel while changing a tire.  It works, but there's a lot of room 
for mistakes. :)  If you've ever heard the death chimes on your Mac from 
blowing up the Partition Map on your only disk you might have second 
thoughts about any program that screws with the Map.

>I guess pdisk doesn't work under NetBSD because of the problems writing
>the partition map to disk. Or is it that it can't re-read the parition
>map? If that's the case one could compile pdisk, use it to partition the
>drive, restart, run newfs on the drive paritions, and away they go.

Nobody has taught it how to do I/O under NetBSD.  It has the I/O routines 
for MkLinux and for MacOS, but none for NetBSD.  It wouldn't be hard to 
do, but it will take some time as all the disk addressing is done in 
MkLinux format.

-bob