> 
> Howdy MacBSD folks ...
> 
> I'm normally a NetBSD/SPARC personage and a sometime dabbler with NetBSD/i386
> on a Pentium 120 upstairs ... but having just acquired a hand-me-down Mac IIci
> for my office, naturally the first order of business was to install NetBSD 1.2
> on it.

Yea!

> I'm having great difficulty doing so.  The disk I have is a Quantum Fireball
> 1.2 Gb which - originally - already had Silverlining 5.6.4 installed on it
> and it was already set up as a Mac HFS volume spanning the entire disk.
> 
> I've encountered two major problems in trying to get the partitioning on it
> done correctly and a correct "mkfs" run.
>
> I've tried partitioning the disk starting with both the pre-canned types
> "A/UX Root&Usr slice 0" and "A/UX v2.0 Setup Min. Mac Vol".  In both cases,
> when I've hit "Update", the little diagnostic window that pops up below
> mumbles something about running "mkfs" under A/UX *3*.0.  Indeed, the first
> time I ran "mkfs" it completed OK (seemingly - more later), yet when I tried
> to run the 1.2 Installer, it claimed it couldn't find any A/UX partitions,
> which I took to mean that the Silverlining install actually created A/UX *3*.0
> partitions instead of 2.0.

I made A/UX 3.0 partitions, and they worked fine. Hmm.

> Anyway, to make a long story short, I've struggled and struggled and finally
> got the following partitioning set up:

[snipped valid-looking partition table]

> Now, doesn't this look perfectly reasonable to everyone?  Yet, as soon as I
> try "mkfs", all hell breaks loose.  First, the dialog box asks which partition
> I want to format and it shows "A/UX Root" as well as TWO "Swap" entries (huh?).
> So I choose "A/UX Root", and let fly.  The mkfs completes and says "I didn't
> see any errors".  So far so good.

They look good.

> Yet as soon as that is done, the MacOS partition is trashed!!  I start getting
> weird errors trying to launch things, and if I "Restart", I get a "?" floppy
> icon because the boot volume is damaged!   I then boot from a System 7.5.3
> CD-ROM and I get a popup saying "Could not open the disk/volume La Cie 1250-Q
> due to an error of Type -127" or somesuch.  Disk First Aid says "There are
> problems but I can't repair them".  Trashed!  I'm now up to my 4th reinstall
> of System 7.5.3 off of the CD-ROM!  Arrggh!  Why did the "mkfs" (apparently)
> go running roughshod over some vital MacOS blocks???
> 
> The 1.2 INSTALL doc mentions APS273 which I downloaded.  But I want the MacOS
> side to run 7.5.3 (7.5.5 eventually), and I'm afraid that because the APS 2.7.3
> stuff is old, it won't be compatible with SCSI Manager 4.3 and that driver you
> see above in slice #1.  So I'd prefer not to use it.
> 
> Help!!!  What am I doing wrong?

I'm not sure. I'll check on error -127 tomorrow at work.

> And while I'm asking ... with the PC port, you can declare a DOS partition
> and also declare (in FDISK or PFDISK) a "type 151" partition which is the
> type for 386BSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD ... when this "logical" partition is declared,
> NetBSD installs itself into that chunk of the disk and then sets up the
> "normal" a-h BSD partitions inside that slice ... yet the Mac port seems to
> demand using these A/UX Root&Usr and A/UX Swap partitions, and separately.
> Why can't the Mac port just declare a "Free" partition that's not an HFS one
> and do the same thing the PC port does?

For the exact same reason that the PC port doesn't use the Dos partition
table as its own. :-) Tradition.

To be honest, you've had the worst trouble I've heard of in a while. Normally
we just have problems with people having too many partitions. :-(

The reason that we use native Mac partitions is, well, known only by the
Alice Group (though Allen might enlighten us). But Apple set up a partitioning
system that is sufficiently powerful to let our partitions, MacOS partitions, and
even MSDOS partitions co-exist. So why not use it? Plus, the i386 way loses
a partition. c is the whole *BSD chunk, while d is the whole disk. We only 
lose partition c to overhead.

Good luck!

Take care,

Bill