On Jul 18, 2005, at 10:57 AM, Daejuan Jacobs wrote:

> Hello, I'm a current Linux user who wants to try out NetBSD. I want to
> know if there is a way to install NetBSD without touching OS X?
Yes.  I take it you mean keep OSX intact. You may to copy a file or 2 
to your hfs+
partition to boot, but otherwise...

>
> When I installled OS X, I made two partitions, 1 for hfs+ for OS X and
> one UFS. Both equal size.
>
You may actually have more, disk utility doesn't show driver 
partitions, etc.
At a terminal prompt, as root, or maybe via sudo
try 'echo L | pdisk' , and it will dump out the partition map for all 
drives,
redirect to file, you may need this to figure out what to pass to 
openfirmware etc.
(It's worth noting that L will "rescan", ejected drives that are still 
on will reconnect).

> I plan on installing from a CD-R
> My specs
> iMac G3 400MHZ
> ATI Rage pro
> I have openfirmware 3
>
> Will the installer work out everything in the UFS? Creating swap,
> etc.. I've read the documentation quite a few times, and just want
> some reassurance, as it's a little confusing.
> Any help is welcome.
>
I'm assuming you've read the docs, faq, nv-faq, etc, and just want over 
any "fuzzy" bits

I don't think that you want to run thru the installer as install, but 
either upgrade, or
install sets whatever option skips disklabeling etc, as disklabel can 
apple's pmap can't cohabitate.    I'd setup the partitions via macosx, 
but if you can use a swap file instead, you can probably just install 
as is, maybe erase the UFS first. If you're paranoid, I'd backup first 
64 sectors or so of the drive, via
  osx# dd if=/dev/rdisk0 bs=512 count=64 of=/where_ever

I typically copy over ofwboot.xcf and the install kernel to the root 
dir of the macosx drive.
Once, I thought I had to this, perhaps I made the cd incorrectly, or 
maybe more likely it was of's tricky syntax, at any rate, at some point 
your going to be booting ofwboot.xcf from your harddisk...  Once you're 
in the installer, I'd drop to the shell via util menu, then
try mounting devices, like maybe: for D in /dev/wd0? ; do mount $D /mnt 
&& break ; done
and verify which slice is what you want.   I do this, as sometimes wd0a 
is some
wierd boot partition or other wierdness, OSX and OF can't directly boot 
a UFS, so diskutil
actually slips in a few more partitions 'transparently' to hide this.

Below is my partition via pdisk, (You can take the fields for partition 
type from it, the only really, hairy part of pdisk) it has the OS9 
drivers ( 2-8), then my netbsd root, and then swap, then hfs+, I got 
there by using disk utility to make a blank HFS partition, then I got 
into pdisk at terminal prompt, delete the HFS partition, ( leaving the 
0S9 drivers ) and manually added the UFS and swap, and then HFS, so I 
don't have any 'boot' partitions'.  pdisk is not that hard, esp with 
the the partition#p syntax, like 10p for start block, etc , and it 
doesn't auto erase anything, it doesn't newfs anything ( in theory one 
could go back and forth mbr/disklabel setup and apple pmap with careful 
editing ),


04:27:42#echo L | pdisk
Top level command (? for help): /dev/rdisk0  map block size=512
    #:                 type name                  length   base      ( 
size )
    1:  Apple_partition_map Apple                     63 @ 1
    2:       Apple_Driver43*Macintosh                 56 @ 64
    3:       Apple_Driver43*Macintosh                 56 @ 120
    4:     Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh                 56 @ 176
    5:     Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh                 56 @ 232
    6:       Apple_FWDriver Macintosh                512 @ 288
    7:   Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh                512 @ 800
    8:        Apple_Patches Patch Partition          512 @ 1312
    9:            Apple_UFS a                    8806400 @ 1824      (  
4.2G)
   10:      Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap                  786432 @ 8808224   
(384.0M)
   11:            Apple_HFS imac_hd            146706832 @ 9594656   ( 
70.0G)

Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=156301488
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
Drivers-
1: @ 64 for 23, type=0x1
2: @ 120 for 36, type=0xffff
3: @ 176 for 21, type=0x701
4: @ 232 for 34, type=0xf8ff

Top level command (? for help): The end