> > First thing: How do I format a drive from within NetBSD?

I believe newfs will do the trick, if you just want to format.

> At the moment, you can't, unless some bright soul has come up with a tool
> very recently. You need to use Apple HD SC Setup (and in particular a
> patched version if the drive is not Apple-branded).

Or pdisk from Bob's website... for some reason no one seems to agree with
me that pdisk was the greatest disk partitioner ever made. Oh well.

I guess pdisk doesn't work under NetBSD because of the problems writing
the partition map to disk. Or is it that it can't re-read the parition
map? If that's the case one could compile pdisk, use it to partition the
drive, restart, run newfs on the drive paritions, and away they go.

> > Second: Would the 4 gig partition even work given the current state of the
> > OS?
>
> Sure. However, the Installer will definitely bug out on you. Get kern.tgz
> on it, install base.tgz as far as it will go, then cpin the rest of the
> packages, boot into NetBSD, and untar them on the flip side. The SCSI error 5
> that you'll get during the initial installation is normal. Make sure you
> *re-install* base.tgz on the flip side.

But where does the installer come into it? It's just a matter of adding a
new disk, right? So once it's paritioned and formated, all that needs to
be one is mounting it as /mnt/whatever and copying things over (taking
symbolic links and permissions into account of course... cp -pR I think.

If you are installing, try sysinst. It's great. Just don't use it to
partition. Use pdisk for that. Or you can use Apple HD SC Setup, but REAL
men use pdisk... ;-)

Hope this helps,
Daniel