On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 10:50:43PM -0500, packet ninja wrote:
> 
> hey.
> 
> my multia died today for reasons as-yet unknown (could be heat stroke :))
> but when i plugged the 4 gig SCSI from the multia into my netbsd macppc
> machine, it refuses to see a disklabel.  (this is *really* bad since i
> have a mail spool and ~/mail tree i *need* to jank off the disk.)

NetBSD has this feature where every platform uses the native disk partitioning
scheme of the native (vendor-supplied) operating system. Typically this is
because the firmware for most platforms already understands partitions. The
up side is that NetBSD partitions are always recognized by the regular
tools for that platform. The down side is that every platform has different
partitioning schemes, so disks can't be taken from one platform and put
on another without difficulty. 

You are going to have to recreate the disklabel on the Mac. If you have
a copy of the old (Alpha) disklabel you can probably use macppc's disklabel
to put it back on the disk Mac-style. 

It is probably best for you to dd the disk into a file on another drive,
so you can be sure you won't corrupt the filesystems with a Mac disklabel.

If you don't have a copy of the disklabel then you need to pull the
find_ffs utility out of the list archives and locate the beginning of each
filesystem on the disk. Then you can recreate a disklabel (see above).
 
> i'll be hooking up myself a DDS2 tonight to prevent future problems.  :P

Duuude. 
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/
           On the community of supercomputer fans:
"But what we lack in size we make up for in eccentricity." 
  from Steve Gombosi, comp.sys.super, 31 Jul 2000 11:22:43 -0600