On Sunday, July 7, 2002, at 07:11 PM, Nigel Pearson wrote:

> Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>> Another thing threw me for a loop, but it seems to be the fault of the
>> Booter, rather than sysinstall. Booter 2.0.0a10 uses a wierd heuristic
>> for determining the root partition, while it ignores bzbFlags.
>
> 	I don't think we have ever had an install tool that sets these flags,
> so the Booter had to do its best to guess the partition.

This is one of the things that Mkfs does when it "changes" a partition 
into one that can be used for NetBSD. Not all 3rd party disk formatters 
did this and most don't do it anymore nowdays.  The original version of 
the MkLinux pdisk had the code in there to do it but it was commented 
out.

>
> Bob theorised:
>> I wonder if this feature got into the Booter because of a
>> mistake I made in Mkfs years ago (that has been corrected).
>
> 	Do tell. What mistake?

*laughing*  When I first started working on Mkfs and added the code to 
"change" a partition into one that could be used for NetBSD I didn't 
know about the flags and failed to set them.  Since the kernel was using 
the flags to determine how to treat the partition it wasn't seeing the 
partitions I had converted to NetBSD use.

> 	If someone can give me the details of these flags,
> I can make the Booter use them.

The flags are documented in the mac68k specific disklabel.h.  They are 
documented in the Mkfs sources, probably in the Installer sources, and 
in the sources for pdisk and   you'll find documentation in the mac68k 
specific section of sysinst in the md.h and md.c files, although there 
are a couple of special things in there used only by sysinst.  Basically 
you want to look at the structures called the "Block Zero Block" or BZB 
which shares the same storage as the BootArgs in the Partition Map Entry 
for the disk partition.

Let me know if you have more questions and thanks for looking into this!

-bob