Bill Studenmund wrote:

>On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Bob Nestor wrote:
>
>> Yes, this is the field I'm thinking about.  Recent dumps of Block0 on 
>> Apple created CDROMs and disks formatted for use with MacOS show that 
>> there are now mulptile entries in there for all four of the values I 
>> listed.  I went digging to find out what they were and dug up the info.  
>> Are you sure we won't ever use the Start Manager?  How about for booting 
>> systems without OF?
>
>Hmmm.... For non-OF systems we might use the Start manager. But we could
>just say that we don't support booting NetBSD-only disks (ones using a
>struct disklabel) on those platforms. We certainly can use Apple
>partitioned disks there, and thus won't run into the overlap. :-)

Unless someone tries to move the disk between OF and non-OF systems, 
right?  I can't boot NetBSD/macppc on my 5320 system so it would have to 
use something like the Start Manager to boot (when it's supported).  But 
if I take that disk to my G3 I couldn't boot from it, or if I created it 
on my G3 I couldn't use it on my 5320.  Am I missing something here?  
Wouldn't it be cleaner to have a format supported by all macppc systems?

Also, how about making bootable CDs that boot via the Start Manager?  Is 
this possible by setting up Block0 so that all four ddType entries point 
to a partition with ofwboot or possible the Installation Kernel?  Would 
the Start Manager then fetch the code from CD into RAM and pass control 
to it?  If so we could select a different value for the ddType and set 
that with a MacOS Control Panel which sets OSDefault.  Isn't this what 
MkLinux does?  If that's the case all we need to do is run something like 
"mkmacbootcd" on the ISO image created by mkhybrid to patch up Block0 and 
the Partition Table and add the bootable code in another partition at the 
end of the CD.  I haven't tried it yet, but I've got most of the code 
already written to do this.

-bob