[plug] Mac expert anyone?

[Steve Boak]

On Thu, 4 Dec 2003 23:44, you wrote:
> > 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.

Damn - I should have thought of that one, especially after figuring out 
that was the way to unmount/eject the floppy :)

> 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.

Yep - it'll have to be floppies unless I can find a CD image. It didn't come 
with any software, but I think I have the url for OS 8.1 floppies somewhere. 
The hfs tools and the xhfs gui are in the woody distro, and work great for 
making mac floppies.

I happen to have two of these machines, so there is a faint hope that I can 
copy the required files back over the appletalk network after partitioning 
the hard drive as the floppy boot supports networking. Need to read up more 
on this though.

> 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.. ).

Don't know the bus type yet (or which hole in the back the card fits in), but 
I'll check that out.

> 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.

Nope :(

> Craig Ringer

Thanks Craig