Subject: Re: Mkfs 1.45 problems
To: John Marohn" , "port-mac68k <port-mac68k@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Bob Nestor <rnestor@metronet.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 07/01/1998 19:47:10
John Marohn <marohn@iquest.net> wrote:

>Is 1.45 the latest version of Mkfs?
>

Should be unless someone has worked on a newer version to fix all the 
problems I might have introduced.

>I used Silverlining to partition a hard drive as follows:
>/     => 100Mb
>swap  =>  64Mb
>/usr  => 450Mb  (actually what's left over)
>/home => 100Mb
>
>The problems are:
>
>1.  I format the following partitions in order: /, /usr, /home.  After
>    the install, df reports the size of /home to be about 613Mb with
>    about 30Mb free.  I did a newfs from the UNIX side and df reports
>    the size to be 99Mb.
>
I don't think I've heard of this one before.  There was a problem 
reported about "df" not reporting correct disk sizes on partitions other 
than the first.  This doesn't sound the same though.  As I recall the 
size was off by a factor of two and it was fixed recenlty.

>2.  After severe file system damage, I decided to re-install everything.
>    I formated the partitions in this order: /, /home, /usr.  After
>    installing everything, df reports the size of /home to be 190MB and
>    /usr to be around 600MB.  I didn't trust this so....
>
Check to see what the physical disk block size is on the disk.  Most Mac 
SCSI disks use 512 which is the only thing NetBSD really supports I 
believe.  I've seen a couple of disks report using physical disk block 
sizes which are multiples of this, but I thought Mkfs was reporting them 
as unusable for NetBSD.  If your disk block size isn't 512, check to see 
if SilverLining can change it to 512 for you.  You'll probably have to do 
a complete low-level format to accomplish this though.

>3.  I reformatted again. This time I formatted one partition and then quit
>    Mkfs.  I did this for each partition. The order is: /usr, /home, /.
>    The results are pending  ( I'm installing the minimum as I am
>    writing this).
>
Shouldn't make any difference, but the output that Mkfs spits out might 
have some clues.  If you can send it to me I can try and poke around and 
see if I can come up with something for you.  If you're willing I can 
also put together a version of Mkfs or supply some utilites that might 
give us some better idea of what's happening in your case.

>Is anyone else seeing this problem???
>
>John

Hope this helps,
-bob