[plug] Mac expert anyone?

[Craig Ringer]

> I have a (mac) boot disk with the partitioning program on it, but the os 
> automatically mounts the hard disk, therefore I can't repartition it. 

Drag the disk to the trash. The mac will unmount it, and you'll be able 
to work on it then. It'll re-appear post-reboot.

I expect you'll still run into the usual problem of partitioning 
destroying the disk contents, BTW, so do have your MacOS install CD (or 
floppies - *uggh*) on hand.

I once had NetBSD booting on a Mac LCIII, but it didn't exactly come 
preconfigured. It booted then said:

!!!! No /etc/passwd file exists.              !!!!
!!!! An emergency root shell will be started. !!!!
#

or something to that effect. I said "eek" and ran away ;-) as I'd never 
even seen UNIX before - hand-creating /etc/passwd would've been a little 
beyond me.

> What I need to know is how to unmount the hard drive so I can stuff around 
> with it. Oh for a command line! Fortunately I have a spare drive to practice 
> on, so I'm not worried about trying things out.

> By the way, does anyone know of the whereabouts of a network card for the 
> above mentioned beast?

It's a NU-Bus machine, yes? Ask on the WA Mac User Group list, someone 
might have some old NU-Bus NICs around. If it's that weird Mac LC-only 
bus (the low profile one) then I'm afraid you're probably out of luck ( 
though I threw one out a few years ago.. ).

If you're lucky the mac will have a built-in AAUI port on it, and you 
can find adapters to connect them to ethernet networks.

Craig Ringer