On Saturday, October 19, 2002, at 08:37 PM, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Oct 2002, webmaster@datazap.net wrote:
>
>>> MacOS only asks about formatting HFS partitions.  You must have some
>>> other partitions that are HFS type that you haven't used yet.  Either
>>> let MacOS initialize them to shut it up from complaining, or go back
>>> into sysinst and make them into some other type of partition.  Mark
>>> them "Free" and MacOS will stop complaining.
>>
>> The partition that it is complaining about is the wd0a (root & usr). 
>> Yet,
>> it doesn't see the wd0b (swap). Also, NetBSD will not boot unless I 
>> boot
>> it from a kernel that is on the Mac partition, and it always asks 
>> where
>> the root partition is. Anyone have any idea as to how to fix this?
>
> What do you mean it "doesn't see" wd0b? "disklabel wd0" doesn't have
> a "b" entry? Sounds like you need to go into sysinstall's partition
> editor to set the NetBSD secret-magic bits that tell the kernel which
> is "root" and which is "swap". "Mkfs" could do it, too, but only on
> SCSI, not on IDE. "pdisk" doesn't set the magic bits, either. You
> really need to do it in "sysinstall".

There are multiple versions of pdisk.  The one in the arch/mac68k and 
arch/macppc directory on the NetBSD ftp site does have a way of setting 
this bits.  These versions also have the ability to format and dump the 
Partition Map.  These versions only run under Mac OS.  I don't think 
the version that runs under NetBSD has this ability turned on though.

I think the original installation was done with sysinst so I don't know 
how these got changed back.  The only thing I can think of is the 
partitions got converted back into HFS partitions at some point.  That 
would clear out the flags.  I've asked for a dump of the Partition Map 
to see if there's any clues that might point to some other problem.

-bob