El JoPe Magnifico <jope@n2h2.com> wrote:

>It's by letter (well, number, actually) not name.  At least for the Mac,
>lettering looks to be based exclusively on position from the beginning of
>the drive, e.g. for the first SCSI device...
>
>/dev/sda1 (partition map)
>/dev/sda2 (driver)
>/dev/sda3 (first partition)
>/dev/sda4 (second parition)
>...and so on...
>
This scheme would work (not confuse users) if all systems were as simple 
as MSDOS in the way they partition the disk.  Unfortunately there is no 
similar standard on the Mac, and many 3rd party disk foramtters scramble 
the order of the partition map entries which would lead to confusion for 
the user.  If you've only worked with one disk formatter on your Mac you 
probably haven't run into this though.

>However, I just tried to get our hardware guy to give me a nice, clean
>explanation, and he went off onto a tangent about primary versus logical
>drives, and only being able to have four primary drives, and two paritions
>being taken up to describe the logical partitions.  As far as I can tell,
>the latter parts are hardware-specific (he works on Intel boxes only),

He was describing the standard MSDOS layout of disk partitions.

>Okay, hold on.  The Booter takes a drive and partition (by name, letter,
>whatever) as an explicit parameter.  Maybe it's default lookup scheme is
>the same as the Installer, but _not_ if the Booter is passed an explicit
>option.  Is this not how it works???  Because the Installer lacks a similar
>such option, it's choking on Unix root partitions that may or may not be 
>BSD paritions, because it only has this default scheme, which is currently
>flawed and assumes (erroneously) any Unix root partition must be a BSD root
>partitions _and_ then assumes (erroneously again) that it must have an ffs,
>
"Flawed and assumes (erroneously)"????  Strange, it seems to do a pretty 
good job for a lot of people running NetBSD.  But then most of us aren't 
trying to install Linux on the same disk.  Given that NetBSD was there 
first maybe you should be pointing fingers at Linux.

>All I'm suggesting is a dialogue before the Installer starts making this
>chain of incorrect assumptions.  If the default lookup scheme is the default

Instead of this why don't you convince the Linux folks to come up with a 
partition naming and/or search scheme that doesn't conflict with NetBSD?  
They could use PRODOS or Apple_Scratch partitions instead of SVR2 ones.  
Then there would be no conflict.

>in this dialogue, fine.  But at least then I've the option of pointing the
>Installer in the right direction before it goes and blunders spectacularly
>due to reasons that we are aware of, but have no way to deal with because
>the assortment of partition formatting tools being used out there are
>apparently so varied in how they work.
>
But you _DO_ have that option. The sources of the Booter, Installer and 
Mkfs are all avaiable on various NetBSD mirrors.  Nothing is stopping you 
from rolling your own set to solve your problem.

>If someone overrides the default in the Installer, then does the same but
>differently in the Booter, and can't boot as a result, well... tough.
>They should RTFM and remember their options between the two applications.
>(Sorry, not meaning to get all vehement.  Really.  Just frustrated.  =/ )
>
Going from MacOS to NetBSD is tough enough. I can't see why we should 
make it any more difficult or error prone for the majority of Mac users.

Couldn't you solve all your current problems by just putting NetBSD on a 
different disk? They aren't all the expensive nowdays and unless you've 
run out of SCSI IDs it sure seems like the simplest solution.

-bob