Hi,

I'm a new user of NetBSD, and so far have been quite impressed with it.  The
only problem I have is getting data from an ext2 partition on my alpha's
secondary disk (sd1) after migrating from Debian Linux to NetBSD.

I talked to a fellow on IRC about this in EFNet's NetBSD channel, and we
discussed it a bit, ending with him saying he had never tried mounting ext2fs on
a pc-style partition table with NetBSD/alpha, and that he wasn't sure it was
possible on the alpha port.

At boot time, and when I run disklabel sd1, it says there is no disklabel, and
when I run disklabel sd1, it shows only the whole disk partition (c).  I tried
mounting the device anyway (as /dev/sd1c), but it says wrong magic number, I'm
guessing because the partition table is taking up some space at the beginning of
/dev/sd1c.  I've been through the mailing list archives, and all the questions
I've seen relating to NetBSD mounting ext2fs have been regarding the x86 port,
and the responses tended to incldue "What does fdisk say?" ... but there appears
to be no fdisk on the alpha port.

Anyway, I'm curious if NetBSD/alpha can read PC-style partitions (the partition
in question was made with Debian/alpha, by its fdisk).  Originally, I had
planned to boot a Linux rescue disk to get the data onto an nfs server which I
could copy back to the NetBSD side from, and reclaim sd1 as ffs.  

Unfortunately, this appears to be easier said than done, as the tools to make a
disk to flash an AlphaStation 200 back to ARC bios seem to only work on Digital
Unix and VMS; aboot, to boot the linux kernel comes only as source, so there's a
bit of a chicken/egg problem there, etc.

So, does anyone have any tips / disk images they can send my way to

* Get NetBSD to read this partition,
* Flash the bios back to ARC temporarily,
* Have an abootable image with ext2fs

If there's some useful bit of info I've left out, I apologize.  Just let me
know, and I'll supply it.

			-pete