Hi,

It may be that APS PowerTools 4.1 is buggy, but I still think there 
are problems in the installer.  I'm using FWB HardDisk Toolkit to
create my partitions and it's never been problematic before.  To eliminate
"Mkfs 1.45" from any of the blame, I formatted using "newfs -O" from
under "NetBSD/Mac68k".  The partition seems to be created fine and
seems to be mountable.  However, when I install, it works for a while,
and then I get errors similar to the ones that you listed ending in an
error from "alloccgblk()".

Did you change the number or size of the partitions at all when
you redid the disk??  I seemed to have no problems with a smaller
partition(100MB), but a 1GB partition install failed.  What size
are your new partitions??

I did take a look for the more obvious limitations in the "ufs" code
in the installer.  The "daddr_t"(disk address) and "off_t"(file offset)
types are defined as signed long integers(4 bytes) as are a lot of the 
other file system related variables.  That should be no problem as it
should support about 2GB(or 2^31).  I'll look for the actual calling
routine that caused the first SCSI read/write error and try to dig up
any clues I can from the variable values at that point.

Steve Brown,
sbrown@best.com

> Everything works fine now. I think I know what the problem was, APS
> PowerTools 4.1 is buggy! (Besides having a graphically overburdened
> user interface that don't behave very well or Mac like.) 
>
> I think the partitions that was created the first time was broken. Now
> when I tried to repartition APS PowerTool trashed the whole disk
> contents without a decent error message. When I tried to redo the
> partitioning it just refused to open the partition dialog, no error
> messages. Tried version 4.07 of the same tool and it told me the disk
> was damaged. Luckily I backed up the Mac partition just before
> partitioning.
>
> I remember that I had the same problems with the old APS tool
> (Alliance PowerTool or similar) and I belive that was a totally
> different program from a different vendor.  Maybe the A/UX part of
> some partitioning software don't get tested well enough because there
> are so few users (and we all leave testing to the users, don't we ;-).
>
> I reformatted and repartitioned using the same tool, APS PowerTools
> 4.1, but created MacOS partitions only and after unmounting them from
> the desktop I converted them to NetBSD partitions with Mkfs
> 1.45. After this the installation worked with no problems at all!
>
> /kgb
>
>
>
>
>
>