Howdy MacBSD folks ...

I'm normally a NetBSD/SPARC personage and a sometime dabbler with NetBSD/i386
on a Pentium 120 upstairs ... but having just acquired a hand-me-down Mac IIci
for my office, naturally the first order of business was to install NetBSD 1.2
on it.

I'm having great difficulty doing so.  The disk I have is a Quantum Fireball
1.2 Gb which - originally - already had Silverlining 5.6.4 installed on it
and it was already set up as a Mac HFS volume spanning the entire disk.

I've encountered two major problems in trying to get the partitioning on it
done correctly and a correct "mkfs" run.

I've tried partitioning the disk starting with both the pre-canned types
"A/UX Root&Usr slice 0" and "A/UX v2.0 Setup Min. Mac Vol".  In both cases,
when I've hit "Update", the little diagnostic window that pops up below
mumbles something about running "mkfs" under A/UX *3*.0.  Indeed, the first
time I ran "mkfs" it completed OK (seemingly - more later), yet when I tried
to run the 1.2 Installer, it claimed it couldn't find any A/UX partitions,
which I took to mean that the Silverlining install actually created A/UX *3*.0
partitions instead of 2.0.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I've struggled and struggled and finally
got the following partitioning set up:

#0	Partition name:	Apple
	Partition type:	Apple_partition_map
	Partition use:	Partition Map
	First block:	1
	Block count:	63

#1	Partition name:	Macintosh_SL
	Partition type:	Apple_Driver43
	Partition use:	Mac Driver
	First block:	64
	Block count:	64

#2	Partition name: La Cie 1250-Q
	Partition type:	Apple_HFS
	Partition use:	Macintosh Volume
	First block:	128
	Block count:	524,284		/* == 262,142 Kb == 256 Mb for MacOS */

#3	Partition name:	A/UX Root
	Partition type:	Apple_UNIX_SVR2
	Partition use:	A/UX Root&Usr slice 0
	First block:	524,412
	Block count:	1,848,372	/* == 924,186 Kb == 902.5 Mb */

#4	Partition name:	Swap
	Partition type:	Apple_UNIX_SVR2
	Partition use:	A/UX Swap slice 1
	First block:	2,372,784
	Block count:	131,072		/* == 64 Mb; machine has 20 Mb RAM */

#5	Partition name:	Extra
	Partition type:	Apple_Free
	Partition use:	Free
	First block:	New partition
	Block count:	0

Now, doesn't this look perfectly reasonable to everyone?  Yet, as soon as I
try "mkfs", all hell breaks loose.  First, the dialog box asks which partition
I want to format and it shows "A/UX Root" as well as TWO "Swap" entries (huh?).
So I choose "A/UX Root", and let fly.  The mkfs completes and says "I didn't
see any errors".  So far so good.

Yet as soon as that is done, the MacOS partition is trashed!!  I start getting
weird errors trying to launch things, and if I "Restart", I get a "?" floppy
icon because the boot volume is damaged!   I then boot from a System 7.5.3
CD-ROM and I get a popup saying "Could not open the disk/volume La Cie 1250-Q
due to an error of Type -127" or somesuch.  Disk First Aid says "There are
problems but I can't repair them".  Trashed!  I'm now up to my 4th reinstall
of System 7.5.3 off of the CD-ROM!  Arrggh!  Why did the "mkfs" (apparently)
go running roughshod over some vital MacOS blocks???

The 1.2 INSTALL doc mentions APS273 which I downloaded.  But I want the MacOS
side to run 7.5.3 (7.5.5 eventually), and I'm afraid that because the APS 2.7.3
stuff is old, it won't be compatible with SCSI Manager 4.3 and that driver you
see above in slice #1.  So I'd prefer not to use it.

Help!!!  What am I doing wrong?

And while I'm asking ... with the PC port, you can declare a DOS partition
and also declare (in FDISK or PFDISK) a "type 151" partition which is the
type for 386BSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD ... when this "logical" partition is declared,
NetBSD installs itself into that chunk of the disk and then sets up the
"normal" a-h BSD partitions inside that slice ... yet the Mac port seems to
demand using these A/UX Root&Usr and A/UX Swap partitions, and separately.
Why can't the Mac port just declare a "Free" partition that's not an HFS one
and do the same thing the PC port does?

(Please respond to me directly as I'm not on port-mac68k.  Thanks.)

	- Greg