>> I had some horrendous problems trying to use my 2 gig Seagate Barracuda
>> with my SE/30. I discovered that the problems were twofold:
>> 
>> 1. Something in the system can't handle drives larger than a certain size.
>>    Even if I split the drive into 256 meg partitions, it would still only
>>    work properly up to a certain arbitrary size that was at the same
>>    physical location, regardless of the partition structure. I sidestepped
>>    the problem by using a monolithic 512 meg partition and a 64 meg swap
>>    partition after that. The rest of the drive is in 2 MacOS partitions.
>>    Oh well - 512 megs is more than enough for this SE/30 anyway. :)
>
>I don't think NetBSD had a problem with big drives, but Bob Nestor has
>pointed out that both mkfs and the installer DO have problems with
>large drives. Basically there's a "big" read and write command, which
>the booter didn't know about. So instead of writing to the upper 1G,
>it wrote to the lower 1G, possably on top of a MacOS drive or worse..
>
>It's been fixed in mkfs.

Yes, there is a version of mkfs that I hope fixes this problem.  It uses 
"small" SCSI read/write commands for disk addressing below 1Gig and 
switches to "big" read/write commands for blocks above the 1Gig mark.  
This should make it compatible with the old mkfs in most cases which is 
required on some older SCSI disks.  However it doesn't handle the 
"gigantic" read/write commands which are used on disks with more than 
2^32 disk blocks.  In addition some of the pesky "Phase Errors" may have 
been fixed, and the "Disk Parameters" display actually displays more of 
the disk parameters.

It also has some new capabilities for handling disk partitions that the 
older mkfs didn't have such as converting MacOC HFS Partitions into AU/X 
Partitions (and back).  There's real potential for totally hosing 
everything on disk, so good backups are a wise precaution no matter which 
version of mkfs one uses.

I'm not sure if there's a copy on ftp.netbsd.org or puma though, so if 
anyone wants to try it they can drop me an E-Mail.  Unless I hear that 
the fixes don't work I'm planning on putting them into an updated version 
of the Installer too.  That should have been completed this weekend, but 
other things took priority.

-bob