My (not nescessarily correct) understanding of this is -

The kernel understands enough about the Apple partition map to pretend
it's a disklabel and access the defined partitions. After you newfs a
partition the system tries to update the disklabel to say "partition a
now has a ffs filesystem on it with a 512-byte blocksize" or some such
housekeeping info. Because the disk doesn't _really_ have a BSD disklabel
on it, this step fails. The partition has still been newfs'd though, and
is perfectly useable.
Have you ever tried to mount/fsck a partition that you've newfs'd this way?=


As for booting from an HFS filesystem, isn't that a function of ofwboot =
and not the kernel? ofwboot from current snapshots can load a kernel from =
an HFS filesystem, ofwboot from the 1.5 release can't afaik.

Russell


On Friday, April 6, 2001 4:34 PM, Andrew White <awhite@arc.corp.mot.com> =
wrote:
>Charles,
>
>There's quite a few of us here marvelling at step 4 in your instructions.=20
>Marvelling because when we type 'newfs /dev/rwd0a' on our cubes it spits
>back some error about refusing to write to the disklabel, which sort-of
>invalidates everything else.  Can you tell us exactly which version of =
the
>boot kernel you used?
>
>For reference, boot.fs on the netbsd "official" distro CD boots from a =
HFS+
>partition, but disklabel fails (sysinst works, but as you said clobbers =
the
>ENTIRE disk).  I have not managed to get either of the other kernels
>(netbsd.macppc, netbsd.ram.gz, netbsd.GENERIC.gz) to boot from HFS nor =
from
>CD rom.
>
>The version 1.5 kernel I'm running on the dual disk G4 works fine, but it
>also refuses to newfs the BSD partitions on the second (Apple
>multi-partitioned) HD.
>
>
>--=20
>Andrew White                Andrew.E.White@motorola.com
>