On Wed, 8 Apr 1998, Bob Nestor wrote:
> The Mkfs and Install Utilities share the same low-level disk I/O 
> routines.  I'm not sure what the Booter uses, but it may be just some 
> higher-level MacOS I/O stuff.  Anyway I've been working on upgrading Mkfs 
> to handle IDE and the alternate SCSI Bus stuff.  I lifted the code from 
> pdisk in the DR2.1 Update 6 release of MkLinux.  So far I have all the 
> low-level disk I/O stuff working and now all I need to do is finish up 
> the menus and import newfs from NetBSD. (Right now the code can find and 
> identify everything I have on my systems, both IDE and SCSI.) I'd planned 
> on using the current version of newfs as it supports both BSD4.2 and 
> BSD4.4 filesystems, although the Installer only handles BSD4.2 right now. 
>  I don't know when I'll finish this effort, but if I knew we had someone 
> actively working on the IDE support in NetBSD/mac68k I'd try a little 
> harder.
> 
> -bob
On a somewhat related note, will the installer ever be upgraded to handle
BSD4.4 filesystems? When I got a new hard drive a few months ago I had
some trouble using mkfs on it, so I just newfs'd it. Now none of my six
partitions (on two hard drives) are usuable in the Installer. This isn't a
special concern to me since my MacOS partition is only something like 15
megs, holding a minimal system and a few NetBSD utils (like the booter).
It does affect my ability to mount the filesystems in the Installer's
minishell so I can cpout to floppy disks and such.

-Simon Raahauge DeSantis