At 8:06 PM -0600 4/1/02, JHSP wrote:
>I have a complicated question that I'm hoping someone can help with.
>Essentially I need to run NetBSD (or possibly Yellow Dog Linux), OS
>X and OS 9.
>
>Here is my setup:
>
>iMac 500mhz
>120G IBM internal IDE drive
>2 160G Maxtor external Firewire drives
>
>What I want to do is run all three OSes for different tasks.
>And I want the two 160G firewire drives to be usable on all three OSes.
>The firewire drives have data that I would like to be able to share
>with a laptop running OS X on the LAN.  That can be accomplished via
>NFS or ftp.  But I also need to have access to the firewire drives
>in all three OSes.

You don't want much do you?  This sounds fun.

First I don't know if Firewire is supported in NetBSD, I suspect not.
I'll assume that it is and that partitioning works the same on
Firewire as on IDE and SCSI disks because I can't help you otherwise.

MacOS 9 is the most restrictive OS.  It only supports HFS, HFS+, and
MS-DOS filesystems.  (The latter perhaps only in the FAT16 version.)
OSX supports all those and an old NeXT variant of FFS.  A -current
version of NetBSD will support the NeXT FFS, but I suspect MacOS 9
won't.  Of those first three MS-DOS is the only common ground.  I've
done it beween OSX and NetBSD.  I think there may even be a FAQ entry
for how to set the partition type so MacOS 9 will recognize it.

A version of NetBSD with hfsutils installed can deal with HFS (not +)
partitions.  I think this is your best bet if you can get it working.
I haven't tried.

Actually I just thought of another possibility:  ISO 9660.  Haven't
tried it, but I know that all three support the base version of that
format, but perhaps not when it's put on a hard disk partition.
NetBSD, and probably OSX will handle it, but don't know about MacOS 9.
-- 
The opinions expressed in this message are mine,
not those of Caltech, JPL, NASA, or the US Government.
Henry.B.Hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu