On Thu, 14 Dec 2000 13:19:38 -0500
Pat Wendorf <beholder@unios.dhs.org> wrote:

> I recently purchased (very cheaply) a Quadra 800 and a Quadra 610 and
> upgraded them to 16 megs of ram for the purpose of installing NetBSD (I
> have many NetBSD i386 machines).  I've read the installation guide and
> the FAQ's which mention the Apple SC Partitioning tool.  I tried the
> tool, but I've found that it tags "*"'s on the 2 partitions (driver,
> MacOS) which signifies that the partitions are in use and cannot be
> modified. Do I need some sort of boot disk, or do I need to reinstall
> MacOS and set the partitions up during the install procedure?  I'm quite
> familiar with Unix, but this supposed Mac "user friendliness" is
> confusing me :)
> 
> I'm sorry if this is also silly question, but is the Mac68k port the
> only one that requires a "stepping stone" OS to boot it?

The easiest way to do this is to get an external SCSI drive with the MacOS, and install the NetBSD tools and some basic Mac utilities for partioning hard drives.  You can then attach this drive to any new Mac you want NetBSD on, make it the boot drive, then reboot the system, so now the target drive inside the Mac is not "in use" when you proceed to re-partition it for use as a NetBSD drive.  After you repartition the target drive with a small (about 5Mb should work) MacOS and copy over the tools, you make that the boot drive and disconnect your utility/external drive and proceed with the install.  It sounds worse than it is...  The effort is worth it because any cheap old Mac you run across for pennies in the future will be a snap for you to 'upgrade' ;)   I find these old 40Mb external drives with MacOS already installed pretty often at flea markets for 1 to 10 dollars.  Ebay has lots of them too.  Good luck!

  


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