At 12:09 PM -0400 6/15/00, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
>Is there any particular reason you're hell-bent on using ofwboot.xcf?

Yes.  I want to boot from something other than a floppy. ;-)

>A copy of boot.fs, dd'ed (or whatever) to a floppy, can be booted on
>every OF 1.0.5 machine where I've tried (a 7500, two 7600s, and a
>7300 just in the last week) with a simple:
>
>ok> boot fd:0

This works just fine, as you say, but the boot floppy still has 
ofwboot.xcf on it.  It's just loaded by bootxx instead of directly by 
OF.  And ofwboot.xcf in turn loads the kernel with the built-in 
compressed memory file system.

>Once booted, install is as usual (though you may have to ifconfig and
>route add by hand), and I've had no troubles using installboot as
>stated in the FAQ and then booting from the hard drive. I don't know
>anything about munging HFS partition maps, though I haven't tried to
>use the same disk for MacOS and NetBSD (largely because the swarm of
>OF 1.0.5 machines I've got are for a cluster computing project in
>which we don't want MacOS at all).

The trouble is I want to set up a server that can sometimes be 
rebooted into MacOS with only one disk drive.   If nobody has any 
alternatives I think I may burn a special boot CD-ROM.  (They don't 
get auto-ejected in MacOS and they are faster than a floppy too.)

>On Thu, Jun 15, 2000 at 08:55:20AM -0700, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
> > First the constructive correction to the FAQ (is the right person
> > listening?).  To boot from a DOS floppy you need to specify partition
> > number 1 as in
> >
> > boot fd:1,ofwboot.xcf
> >
> > It may not be needed for OF >= 2, but it is for OF 1.0.5 on my test
> > machine.  Of course it then says that the file is in an invalid
> > format so I assume I have a binary/ascii transfer problem somewhere
> > as well.
> >
> > Second the generic plea for help.  Is it really true that you can't
> > get OF to boot a file from a HFS partition?  I certainly haven't
> > gotten anywhere trying, but I thought that should be possible.
> >
> > Is it really true that bootxx conflicts with the Apple Partition Map?
> > You can't have boot blocks understood by OF and an APM on the same
> > disk?
> >
> > Given the above two problems, how would one set up an OF 1.0.5
> > machine to boot into NetBSD?  I suppose I can create a boot CD-ROM
> > and set up some options so that ofwboot.xcf will cross-boot from the
> > hard disk.  Even if I can solve the auto-eject problem a floppy is
> > just too damn slow for normal use.
> >
> > Any documentation on ofwboot anywhere?  I think it takes some command
> > line options, but I'm not sure where to look.


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