At 12:09 PM -0500 8/22/01, John Valdes wrote:
>On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 05:30:38AM +0200, Samuel Hornus wrote:
> > Second question : can I format a partition in MSDOS file format ?
> > I tried newfs_msdos /dev/wd0d but it did not work...
>
>Someone please correct me, but I don't think this is currently
>possible for hard drives.  From the (1.5) newfs_msdos man page:
>
>BUGS
>     There is currently no way to specify obscure file system parameters.
>     Thus, only media with one of the supported capacity values can be format-
>     ted.  For the same reason, it's not possible to handle hard disk parti-
>     tions.  More options should be added to allow this.  More entries should
>     be added to the table of known formats, too.
>
> > (because this is a partition I'd like to share between MacOS and NetBSD
> >  and it seems MSDOS is the only file system available on both sides...
> >  am I right ?)
>
>That is mountable, readable & writable, correct.  It looks like you'll
>have to format the DOS partition under MacOS.  See the FAQ (specifically
>http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/faq.html#disk-sharing) for some
>details.

I haven't been able to play with it a lot, but you can format it as a 
FAT 16 partition under MacOS X and it will mount inside the netbsd 
installer kernel.  Note that FAT 32 is the default and that will not 
work under netbsd.