[sorry I'm following-up a follow-up to the message I want\
> > actually, what are we really needing?  Most disk drives are already shipped
> > with some software that will put the basic scsi driver and partitions on a
> > drive.
> 
> If we could grab the drivers that are already on the drive then writing a
> NetBSD/mac68k (re)formatter might be practical. One problem is that there
> tends to be driver/partition-layout specific information in some places for
> the driver to read.
> 
> > Writing a little program to muck with partitions (creating, deleting) would
> > be rather easy to do.  The difficult parts of a writing a "formatter" would
> > be actually doing a low level scsi format, and the generic scsi driver needed
> > for the disk (although there is a driver in the rom, i dont know what the
> > on disk driver is used for)
> 
> The "low level scsi format" is a single SCSI command! I wrote a disk
> initialiser for my Quantum LT730S which turned out to be easier than I
> expected. The bit that takes too much time and effort is writing the 
> SCSI driver that should be written onto the disk. The driver in the
> Mac's ROM is supposedly a generic (and presumably low-performance) one
> intended to be used just during booting.

I've been following this thread, and it strikes me that we don't need a
formatter. We need something that makes A/UX partitions. What's the
difference? All we really need to do is come along and change partitions
made by some generic partitioning program. As someone mentioned, the
partition table layout is documented in IM (IM-4 in the oldstyle, files(?)
in the new).

Such a utility would have helped me. I made Root, and USR partitions on my
Q730. I re-sized the USR partition, and lost the "I'm a USR partition" bit
in the flags. I had to manually go in and set the bit in that partition's
entry in the partition table.

So what would work fine would be a utility to go in and make partitions
into NetBSD partitions. All it has to do is make the partition entry
look right for disklabel.c. Thus we don't have to worry about drivers
on the disk for MacOS, or any other MacOS-isms.

Actually, as the installer knows about all the partitions, it could
probably be modified to have a command to make the selected partition
either a root, a usr, or an other A/UX partition (if we support "other").

I'd volinteer, but I'm working on GhostScript and the serial ports. We're
up to working serials, and working (I think) Serial Echo. :-)

Take care,

Bill