On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, moskimus wrote:

> I've installed NetBSD 1.4.2 on me Beige G3 266 tower.  Booted to the 
> floppy and went through sysinst with the NFS option. Everything went 
> well but the system won't boot unattended.
> 
> After I turn the system on it runs through the list of devices and 
> then prompts me for the boot device.  I type "sd0a". Then it prompts 
> me for a dump partition, default is my swap partition (sd0b) so I hit 
> enter.  Then it asks for the type of file system, default is generic 
> so again I hit enter.
> 
> I haven't found anything in the FAQs or elsewhere on the netbsd.org 
> site that would lead me to believe that this is normal behavior.  I 
> compiled my own kernel with the only changes being removal of devices 
> that I don't have/use and there has been no change.

Strange. I don't understand that. What does (did) the boot string look
like? Was the an -a at the end?

> I have wondered if this has something to do with ofwboot.xcf and the 
> LOAD-BASE set to 0x6c0000 thing that I have read much about but don't 
> really understand.  I tried installing on a 7600 and changed the 
> value of LOAD-BASE on that machine and now it won't do anything.  I 
> get the startup chime and then nothing at all happens.  I can't clear 
> then pram with command-option-p-r or get to the OF with 
> command-option-o-f, both of which I had no trouble with before I 
> changed that value.

You need to be pressing these sequences before the chime happens.

LOAD-BASE is a variable which tells OF where to load the boot loader. For
loading from disk, it doesn't look in the file (which would tell it these
things) but instead needs to be explicitly told. If the value you give OF
isn't right for the program (ofwboot.xcf) you load, the machine bombs.

Remember also that the 7600 has OF 1.0.5 or so - it has version 1
OF. Apple never expected this to do anything other than load MacOS. OF was
for debugging, so by default it uses the serial port (modem) as a serial
console (at 38400 bps). Booting into MacOS resets the console settings to
serial console.

Hook up a terminal and see what happens. :-)

Take care,

Bill