Michael R Zucca <mrz5149@cs.rit.edu> wrote:

>> working ide driver, how could we use  the { install, booter } programs
>> with ide disks since they only support scsi for now (?).
>
>This is a very legitmate concern. However, what we could do to start work
>on the driver would be to boot off a SCSI drive and mount an IDE drive
>to test. Eventually, though, the installer and booter would have to be
>re-written to handle IDE as well.

I thought I sent this to the list, but I haven't seen it show up so maybe 
I hit the wrong button.  Anyway....

The Mkfs and Install Utilities share the same low-level disk I/O 
routines.  I'm not sure what the Booter uses, but it may be just some 
higher-level MacOS I/O stuff.  Anyway I've been working on upgrading Mkfs 
to handle IDE and the alternate SCSI Bus stuff.  I lifted the code from 
pdisk in the DR2.1 Update 6 release of MkLinux.  So far I have all the 
low-level disk I/O stuff working and now all I need to do is finish up 
the menus and import newfs from NetBSD. (Right now the code can find and 
identify everything I have on my systems, both IDE and SCSI.) I'd planned 
on using the current version of newfs as it supports both BSD4.2 and 
BSD4.4 filesystems, although the Installer only handles BSD4.2 right now. 
 I don't know when I'll finish this effort, but if I knew we had someone 
actively working on the IDE support in NetBSD/mac68k I'd try a little 
harder.

So, if anyone would like to try updating the Installer and/or the Booter 
I can supply the I/O routines I have working already.

-bob