At 6:20 AM -0800 12/14/00, Greg Troutman wrote:
>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,

Right.  You can't reformat the partition that the formatter (or it's 
OS) is running from.

>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,

Yes this is nice, but you don't have to go this far.  The normal way 
to handle this on 68k Mac's is to use the Disk Tools boot floppy. 
Then you install a minimum version of MacOS on a 4+ MB partition that 
you left for the purpose.  I usually add MacTCP and Fetch to the 
minimum system and the MacBSD tools, and I make it big enough to hold 
the biggest installation tar file as well.

You can't get away from MacOS and -- until recently -- most of us 
didn't want to because we wanted to be able to switch boot anyway. 
If the Mac is just another box to run *BSD on I suppose that's bad, 
but the work needed to eliminate the MacOS dependence is substantial.


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