NeXT format disklabels/partition tables



Hi,

I've been trying to get NEXTSTEP 3.3/Intel running under QEMU and
Bochs. I have taken a CD image of my NS 3.3 install CD but find that
the following sequence always ends in a failure to boot the installer,
exactly the same under either emulator:
- boot from 3.3 Boot floppy with hard disk image attached at primary
master, and CD-ROM image attached at primary slave (you have to patch
QEMU vl.c to achieve this setup)
- load Device Drivers floppy, nominate bogus SCSI CD-ROM driver
- load Additional Drivers floppy, nominate EIDE/ATAPI driver
- proceed - get to Mach boot screen, ATA hard disk (hd0) and ATAPI
drive (sd0) detected
System Panic:
vfs_mountroot: cannot mount root
The earlier error is sd0a: Read attempt with no valid label

On the face of it, it would look like the CD image is bad, or maybe
there is some header that needs to be stripped from the image (I
believe I created them using dd on the raw disk device on a Mac
Powerbook G4). However, I have no way of confirming their integrity,
since I cannot find any documentation of what a NEXTSTEP disk
label/partition table should look like! A dump of the first few bytes
of the CD image is below. Can anyone shed any light on this?

Since I am a long way from where my NS CDs are stored, I'd like to try
and confirm that these images are no good before I try to obtain new
ones.

--Toby

$ hexdump -C ns33.cdimage |head|cut -c 11-
00 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff 00 00 02 00 01 |................|
64 6c 56 33 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 4e 45 58 54 |dlV3........NEXT|
53 54 45 50 5f 33 2e 33 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |STEP_3.3........|
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 17 52 64 88 4e 45 58 54 |.........Rd.NEXT|
53 54 45 50 5f 33 2e 33 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |STEP_3.3........|
00 00 00 00 72 65 6d 6f 76 61 62 6c 65 5f 72 77 |....removable_rw|
5f 73 63 73 69 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 |_scsi...........|
00 00 00 20 00 00 00 40 00 00 04 00 00 00 01 2c |... ...@.......,|
00 50 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 |.P..............|
00 00 00 30 73 64 6d 61 63 68 00 00 00 00 00 00 |...0sdmach......|

.



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