On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

> At 2:07 PM -0700 6/20/99, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> >On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, Dan Winship wrote:
> >>    Perhaps on the 1.5 CD (assuming there will be such a thing), we can
> >>    install a hacked ofwboot as /macppcboot or something, with the path
> >>    to the macppc install kernel hard-coded into it so that people
> >>    could just "boot cd:0,macppcboot". Of course, users would still
> >>    have to deal with getting into Open Firmware. It would be neat to
> >>    make the CD actually bootable without having to enter Open
> >>    Firmware, but that might require having an HFS partition, which
> >>    might not be possible. Anyone have any relevant clues?
> >
> >I'm looking into what the CHRP machines will do with multi-boot. I think
> >we can support it easily. I'm not sure how to get the CD to be bootable if
> >we need MacOS - we'd need a license for that. :-(

Hmm. Maybe not.

> >But please look into it if you want!
> 
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you use BootVariables to tell OF where
> the boot file is and boot directly from an ISO9660 CD-ROM, independent of
> any other ports on the disk.  That is, can't you give OF a full path name
> to boot from?  This would not require MacOS (or license) and should not
> require the user to use the OF command line.

No, you can boot from an explicit path on the iso9660 disk.

The trick would be getting that path into OF. :-)

> Perhaps the ISO support is broken, like so many other things.  Perhaps
> there is some problem I don't know about in the second stage of the boot
> process?

No, I think it's fine.

Take care,

Bill