On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Dan Winship wrote:

> > BTW I'd like to change the partition map now (before I start installing lots
> > of stuff) in anticipation of later dual booting with NetBSD; should I have
> > one extra partition besides MacOS or a small fleet of them like on mac68k?

I'd vote for the small fleet of them. Make one MacOS partition for each
NetBSD partition you want. You really only need root & swap, others are at
your discresion (sp?).

With a -current kernel, if you haven't disklabeled the disk, the MacOS
partitions will show up now. I'm looking into getting UNIX tools to mess
around with their types, but in the mean time, I think the mac68k utility
mkfs should work fine.

> I think this depends somewhat on the results of the disklabels vs
> wedges war. But if you make one big one now you can split it into
> several smaller ones later if needed. (macppc currently uses one big
> one.)

?? macppc, until last month, uses a NetBSD disklabel, which is seperate
from the MacOS partitioning. The two can exist on the same disk
simultaneously, and don't have to point to the same partitions..

If you want to co-exist with MacOS, I really suggest using macos
partitioning. Otherwise it's hard to keep from over-wiping partitions -
you have to keep track of info in two places.

> You ought to be able to install both NetBSD and MacOS on the disk now,
> it's just that the tools aren't going to make it nice and easy for
> you. First install NetBSD, using only part of the disk. (Not sure if
> sysinst lets you do that, so you might have to netboot and install by
> hand.). Run installboot to create a partition table covering the
> NetBSD partition. Then boot MacOS off CD, add a MacOS partition with
> the Apple HD utility, and install MacOS onto it.

DON'T use sysinst as I think it will call installboot, and certainly don't
call installboot directly. It will HOSE your MacOS disklabel. We need to
fix it so that installboot will look to see if there's a partition table
already there before proceeding, and only overwrite ones it made. 

(installboot generates a fake MacOS partition table whose only contents
fit within the first 8 k of the disk (ffs boot block zone) and whose
contents are a version of the ofwboot program.)

Also, installboot doesn't work for iMac's - they will (unfortunatly) only
boot from a file on an HFS partition. :-(

I also think that someone (wasn't it you, Dan?) was mentioning that the
ide controller won't work if you boot off of it. Somethign weird happens
when OF closes the device..

Take care,

Bil