NetBSD/macppc Partitioning HOW-TO

You will need to use Drive Setup version 1.8.1 or later. This is the version that comes with Mac OS 9.0. If you are unsure, you need to select Drive Setup and pick Get Info from the File menu.

If you have an older version of Mac OS, you can download either the Mac OS 9.0.4 (12.2 MB), Mac OS 9.1 (71 MB), Mac OS 9.2.1 (82 MB), or Mac OS 9.2.2 (21.3 MB) updates, all of which include a version of Drive Setup that works for us. Note, these are big Mac OS updates, so you will have to download a multi-megabyte disk image just to get the 500 KB Drive Setup application. Apple has not provided a recent version of Drive Setup as a standalone update.

Also, the Darwin installer has a version of Drive Setup that works. Darwin is also enormous (120.7 MB), since it contains a complete operating system.

You'll need to open the disk image and copy Drive Setup to a hard drive, RAM disk, Zip disk, or floppy disk (it can't run from the disk image).

When you first run Drive Setup, it'll give you a screen like this, where you can select the drive that you want to re-partition.

Select the drive to re-partition and click the Initialize... button. This will open another dialog box. Click the Custom Setup... button.

Select the number of partitions you'll be using. You will probably need at least 5 partitions, see the INSTALL notes for suggestions.

Pick the Partitioning Scheme first since you lose all of your Volumes info each time you chose a different number of partitions.

For each of the Volumes set the Type: under the Volume Info and Size: as suggested in the INSTALL notes.

You can use the TAB key to rotate through the Volumes.

When you're done, you should have something like the following (you get to name the Mac OS partitions later from the Finder):

Click the OK button. It will request confirmation of the changes.

This is the point of no return! If you accept the changes, it will erase all contents of your drive

After it's done partitioning and creating the HFS(+) partitions, it will return to the original screen.

Note: the A/UX partitions are not accessible to Mac OS.

You can quit Drive Setup, you're done with it. Now, from the Finder, you can rename your HFS(+) partitions. If you are using an Open Firmware 1.0.5 or 2.0.x model, you're done -- continue with the INSTALL notes.

If your model has Open Firmware 2.4 or 3, and you're going to make this disk bootable for NetBSD, you still need to do one more step.

You will need to copy ofwboot.xcf (the bootloader) and netbsd.GENERIC_MD.gz or netbsd.ram.gz (the installer) to one of the HFS(+) partitions on your drive. Make sure that you have downloaded these files in binary mode.

Launch Disk Utility. From the install CDs, it's under the "Install" menu. From Mac OS X, open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.

You may need to authenticate. If it says "Click the lock to make changes." in the lower left corner of the window, click the lock and type in your password (you are using an administrative account, aren't you).

Select the disk to partition in the left panel. Click on the "Partition" tab. Pick your "Volume Scheme" (i.e. the number of partitions you want).

Set the names, formats, and sizes of your partitions. Hint: to make partitions smaller than it recommends, type a number into the size box and hit enter to get it to accept your partition size. "Mac OS Extended" HFS+ partitions have a minimum size of 4 MB. For example, on my two-partition disk (a small HFS partition for ofwboot.xcf and a large UFS partition for NetBSD), Disk Utility looks like this:

Choose whether to install Mac OS 9 disk drivers. This is your only opportunity if you think you'll ever want to access any partitions on this disk from Mac OS 9 or earlier. Even HFS partitions are inaccessible from Mac OS 9 if you don't click this button.

Click OK and follow through.

You can quit Disk Utility, you're done with it. Now, from the Finder, you can rename your HFS(+) and UFS partitions. If you are using an Open Firmware 1.0.5 or 2.0.x model, you're done -- continue with the INSTALL notes.

If your model has Open Firmware 2.4 or 3, and you're going to make this disk bootable for NetBSD, you still need to do one more step.

You will need to copy ofwboot.xcf (the bootloader) to one of the HFS(+) partitions on your drive. Copy netbsd.GENERIC_MD.gz (the installer) to your UFS partition (though it can also sit on an HFS(+) partition). Make sure that you have downloaded these files in binary mode.

Remember, you'll need a -current kernel to use UFS as a root partition, and it may not be recognized by NetBSD as partition "a".

Get pdisk.

Determine the device name for the disk you're going to repartition or view. If you are repartitioning, unmount any of those disk's partitions that might be mounted.

Run pdisk /dev/disk-device, where disk-device is something like:

  # ./pdisk /dev/disk2
  Edit /dev/disk2 -
  Command (? for help): ?
  Notes:
    Base and length fields are blocks, which vary in size between media.
    The base field can be <nth>p; i.e. use the base of the nth partition.
    The length field can be a length followed by k, m, g or t to indicate
    kilo, mega, giga, or tera bytes; also the length can be <nth>p; i.e. use
    the length of the nth partition.
    The name of a partition is descriptive text.
  
  Commands are:
    C    (create with type also specified)
    c    create new partition (standard unix root)
    d    delete a partition
    h    help
    i    initialize partition map
    n    (re)name a partition
    P    (print ordered by base address)
    p    print the partition table
    q    quit editing
    r    reorder partition entry in map
    s    change size of partition map
    t    change a partition's type
    w    write the partition table

Double-check you're on the right disk. If it's already got an Apple Partition Map, everything should be OK.

  Command (? for help): P

  Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/disk0'
   #:                type name             length   base    ( size )
   1: Apple_partition_map Apple                63 @ 1      
   2:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh            56 @ 64     
   3:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh            56 @ 120    
   4:    Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh            56 @ 176    
   5:    Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh            56 @ 232    
   6:      Apple_FWDriver Macintosh           512 @ 288    
   7:  Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh           512 @ 800    
   8:       Apple_Patches Patch Partition     512 @ 1312   
   9:          Apple_Free                     192 @ 1824   
  10:           Apple_UFS shared          1700000 @ 2016    (830.1M)
  11:           Apple_HFS macos            408788 @ 1702016 (199.6M)
  12:          Apple_Free                       8 @ 2110804

  Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=2110812 (1.0G)
  DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
  Drivers-
  1:  23 @ 64, type=0x1
  2:  36 @ 120, type=0xffff
  3:  21 @ 176, type=0x701
  4:  34 @ 232, type=0xf8ff

If the disk does not have an APM, it'll give you some errors and you'll need to initialize the APM before creating new partitions.

  Command (? for help): P
  No partition map exists
  Command (? for help): i
  read failed
  Command (? for help): P

  Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/rdisk2'
   #:                type name    length   base    ( size )
   1: Apple_partition_map Apple       63 @ 1      
   2:          Apple_Free Extra  2110749 @ 64      (1.0G)

  Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=2110812 (1.0G)
  DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

Delete unused partitions and create your partitions. There's no need to delete the Apple_Free partitions, those automatically take up any unassigned space.

Use the P command to list the partitions to make sure you delete the right one(s).

  Command (? for help): d
  Partition number: 9

Useful partition types you might want to create are:

  Command (? for help): C
  First block: 2p
  Length in blocks: 100m
  Name of partition: Zathras
  Type of partition: Apple_HFS
  Command (? for help): C
  First block: 3p
  Length in blocks: 800m
  Name of partition: netbsd
  Type of partition: Apple_UNIX_SVR2
  Available partition slices for Apple_UNIX_SVR2:
    a   root partition
    b   swap partition
    c   do not set any bzb bits
    g   user partition
  Other lettered values will create user partitions
  Select a slice for default bzb values: a
  Command (? for help): C
  First block: 4p
  Length in blocks: 4p
  Name of partition: swap
  Type of partition: Apple_UNIX_SVR2
  Available partition slices for Apple_UNIX_SVR2:
    a   root partition
    b   swap partition
    c   do not set any bzb bits
    g   user partition
  Other lettered values will create user partitions
  Select a slice for default bzb values: b
  Command (? for help): P

  Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/rdisk0'
   #:                type name     length   base    ( size )
   1: Apple_partition_map Apple        63 @ 1      
   2:           Apple_HFS Zathras  204800 @ 64      (100.0M)
   3:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 netbsd  1638400 @ 204864  (900.0M) S0 RUFS k0  /
   4:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap     267548 @ 1843264 (130.6M) S1  SFS k0  (swap)

  Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=2110812 (1.0G)
  DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

Write out the new partition map and quit.

  Command (? for help): w
  Writing the map destroys what was there before. Is that okay? [n/y]: y
  Command (? for help): q

Create new filesystems.

Mount your new filesystems.

If you are using an Open Firmware 1.0.5 or 2.0.x model, you may want to copy netbsd.GENERIC_MD.gz (the installer) to your FFS or UFS partition. Make sure that you have downloaded this file in binary mode. You'll still need to load ofwboot.xcf from another source to boot your machine, though.

If your model has Open Firmware 2.4 or 3, and you're going to make this disk bootable for NetBSD, you will need to copy ofwboot.xcf (the bootloader) to one of the HFS(+) partitions on your drive. From NetBSD, use the hcopy command. Copy netbsd.GENERIC_MD.gz (the installer) to your FFS or UFS partition (though it can also sit on an HFS(+) partition). Make sure that you have downloaded these files in binary mode.

Remember, you'll need a -current kernel to use UFS as a root partition, and it may not be recognized by NetBSD as partition "a".

Partition your hard drive with an HFS partition (type Apple_HFS) reserved for MS-DOS.

Next, boot Mac OS 8.1-9.x, grab a copy of Disk Charmer or DiskCharmer, and set it up to create an MS-DOS file system. Your settings should look something like this:

Drag the partition onto DiskCharmer's window and it will prompt you before erasing it and creating an MS-DOS file system in place of the HFS file system you created in the first step.

Now, when you boot Classic Mac OS, this partition will automatically mount using PC Exchange or File Exchange (depending on what it's called in your version of Mac OS).

When you boot into Mac OS X, Linux, or NetBSD, run the following command:

mkdir -p /msdos.filesystem;/sbin/mount_msdos -m 777 /dev/disk0s11 /msdos.filesystem

where /msdos.filesystem is the mount point you'd like, and /dev/disk0s11 is the device name for your partition. Alternatively, for NetBSD and Linux, you can add an entry to your /etc/fstab to always mount this filesystem.

To get Mac OS X and Darwin to automatically mount your MS-DOS file system, you need to create a System Startup bundle. The SystemStarter HOWTO is a good reference if you want to learn more about creating your own startup bundles. There's probably a way to do this using autodiskmount, but this technique works fine. The only downside is that the MS-DOS filesystem is unavailable to the Classic environment. Here's an example of what to do:

Actual order on the disk (0 thru max partition number):

This is the scheme used by Open Firmware and the /dev/diskXsY device files in Mac OS X and Darwin. The order of partitions is directly related to the order you selected in Drive Setup, pdisk, or the NetBSD partitioning tools. You can print out this list from any OS using pdisk.

Mac OS-visible partitions (by partition name in Finder):

While you may have created a bunch of partitions in Drive Setup, only those partitions visible to Mac OS will show up in the Finder.

The only partitions visible to Mac OS 9 and earlier are those formatted in HFS, HFS+, or MS-DOS formats. The only partitions visible to Mac OS X and later are those formatted in HFS, HFS+, UFS, and MS-DOS (not NetBSD's 4.2BSD FFS).

NetBSD-visible partitions (letters a thru h, as seen by disklabel):

NetBSD reorders the partitions such that things work out better for itself. The fstype reported by disklabel(8) is set by the Apple Partition Map flags, and does not depend on the actual type of filesystem on that partition (be it NetBSD FFS, Apple HFS, or MS-DOS). In particular, MS-DOS formatted partitions show up as HFS partitions, if created using the method in Creating a shared MS-DOS filesystem.