At 12:05 PM +0100 2/17/2001, Terje Elde wrote:
>  > Boot from a floppy and you can re-format and/or partition the hard disk. 
>>  There are some old 3rd party disk formatters that used to leave strange
>>  partitions on the disk that would create the situation you describe.  The
>>  patched Apple formatter won't do this, so the solution is to reformat and
>>  partition with it.
>
>Chicken and egg problem then.
>
>I can't do anything with the apple utilities until I've wiped the FWB, and I
>can't wipe the FWB until I've used the apple utilities to partition for NetBSD
>install so I can wipe the disk.
>
>I wish there was a MacOS version of dd, so I could thrash the thing.
>
>I guess I'll just have to go hunting for friends with proper SCSI cards and
>force them to wipe it for me.

You could also try pdisk. It's not a normal MacOS app... it has a 
CLI, and it allows you do edit the partition map of any disk 
(including the boot disk). Unfortunately, it doesn't format disks, 
but you could use it to change the label/type of the FWB driver 
partition (or whatever it is) to something else... or delete it's 
entry entirely.

You can get it from Bob's server:
ftp://murphy.dyndns.org/pub/map/

You can also resize partitions with pdisk (because it doesn't format 
them), but you have to be clever. (And use a disk repair utility 
liberally.) IIRC, I did it to an HFS partition once, but I'm really 
not sure I if I just thought about it or actually did it.

HTH,
Daniel