On Mon, 6 Jan 1997, Allan 'Norm' Crain wrote:

> Sorry if this is horribly basic, but I've only dealt with nice easy little IDE
> drives on x86 Linux systems. How would I format a SCSI hard drive under
> NetBSD/Sparc? It's a Micropolis 1558, and I don't know what ID it's on... Any
> help would be appreciated. :)
you have to create an entry for your drive in /etc/disktab ( I think it
was disktab... or something very similar ) where the disktype has to be
set to SCSI, a geometry that matches your drive somehow and a c: partition
with exactly the blockcount of your drive ( you may take less but I don't
think you want this :-) ) and them put the new disklabel onto your disk
using something like <disklabel -w -r /dev/sd?c yourlabel> I think it was
this, better have a look into disklabels man page ( something like ... put
an initial label onto your disk ) so. then set EDITOR to your favorite
text editor if you don't like vi and type <disklabel -E /dev/sd?c> and
create something like this:
a:	32768	300	4.2BSD	1024	1024	40
which creates a partition a which is 16MB, starts at offset 300 ( to
prevent eventual bootcode from being overwritten ) type 4.2BSD, inodesize
1024 bytes and 40 cylinders per cylindergroup. other types may be <boot>
for your c partition to make the disk bootable, <swap> for a swap
partition and <4.2BSD> for a BSD filesystem.
if this works without an error ( verify the disklabel using <disklabel
/dev/sd?c )  you may create filesystems using <newfs /dev/sd?a> or
something like this.

PS. partitions should start and end on cylinder boundaries.

good luck, you may need it.
Michael