NAME

neb-hdtoolbox - Create and modify Amiga partition tables ("amiga disklabel")

SYNOPSIS

neb-hdtoolbox device

DESCRIPTION

neb-hdtoolbox serves two purposes:

(1)
Cross-bootstrap any harddisk for NetBSD/amiga usage from ANY NetBSD-supported platform.

Traditionally, this task was done with the "hdtoolbox" program that comes with Amiga OS. With neb-hdtoolbox, neither this program nor a running Amiga (OS) system is required anymore.

The steps to install NetBSD/amiga on a new harddisk using neb-hdtoolbox are as follows:

- Put the disk in your i386 or whatever

- Create partitions with neb-hdtoolbox

- Copy miniroot.fs to the disk using dd(1)

- Put the disk in your amiga

- Boot off the installer partition
(2)
Modify an already existing Amiga partition table/pseudo disklabel from NetBSD/amiga (or any other NetBSD platform). This allows adding/removing/resizing NetBSD slices (what disklabel(8) can't do on amiga yet).

neb-hdtoolbox comes with an interactive user interface. Like disklabel(8)'s user interface, capital letters form commands while small letters start the partition editor (hitting "b" either creates or edits slice b).

Regardless of the platform you're using neb-hdtoolbox on, partition "c" always refers to the whole disk.

In contrast to disklabel(8), all slice sizes in neb-hdtoolbox are cylinders, not sectors.

Hit "?" in the interactive menu to see the list of available commands.

OPTIONS

-h
Show program usage

EXAMPLES

neb-hdtoolbox wd1

TODO

So far, only interactive use of this program is possible. It'd be nice to have a similar "user interface" the disklabel(8) program has, especially the capability to read partition information from a textfile looks like a must-have.

AUTHOR

Florian Stoehr (netbsd@wolfnode.de)

UNRESTRICTIONS

neb-hdtoolbox is distributed under the terms of the BSD license.

BUGS

No known bugs. If you find any, report them to me.