Henry,

>At 4:23 AM -0800 1/7/01, David Henderson wrote:
>>1. How do I tell "NetBSD/macppc OpenFirmware Boot, Revision 1.2"
>>that the netbsd.ram.gz file is on the CDROM?
>
>Just stick the filename on the command line in place of the "-a" or
>enter it after the Boot: prompt.  I think the default device is where
>ofwboot.xcf itself came from.
>
>>3. Do I ignore the section in the FAQ that says that I need to
>>mangle the file names to the 8x3 MS-DOS format and put the names in
>>upper case?
>
>The answer may depend on the OF version you are running and your CD
>burner program.  Why don't you do a "dir scsi/sd@3:0" and see what it
>says about the disk you created?  If it's a real ISO format disk then
>the filenames are supposed to be all-caps-8.3 with version numbers
>after a ';'.  The version numbers are not needed if it's OF 1.0.5 I
>can say from experience, but if the files are recorded with them you
>need to enter them.


I'm using Toast to burn the CDROM. Because I'm not sure from the
instructions whether to put a GZIP'd or vanilla netbsd.ram on the top level
directory I have a CDROM that has both.

The dir command from open firmware doesn't work for me. I went back to
Toast and went back through the Toast setup, this time telling it to use
only MS-DOS names. What showed up is /NETBSD.RAM and /NETBSDRA.GZ

Armed with this knowledge, I went back to OF, loaded "OpenFirmware Boot"
with the partition 0 bootloader and have slightly different results(see the
postscript). The difference is that I get "Input/output error" instead of
"No such file or directory". I'm not sure where else to go now with OF on
the StarMax. I ran into difficulties with the mesh SCSI controller and
Linuxppc on this machine in a very similar situation; a different
installation kernel was required.

My next thought is to make some kind of special installation of netbsd.ram
with the partition 0 bootloader on an external device of some kind. I have
both a Zip drive and a completely empty 2gig external hard drive for
experimentation.


> From your email you are "pretty close".  There is probably some
>strange apparently-irrelevant setup in OF that is interfering with
>the load.  I suggest you try checking/changing all the things you can
>in the OF setup to see what has an effect (yeah, I know, not a very
>specific suggestion).

SystemDisk 2.3.1 has no effect; the StarMax/5000 is not supported by Apple
and I haven't found any other source of firmware updates.

Thanks for the encouragement, Henry.

David

PS- output from zterm from the latest experiment:

Open Firmware, 2.0.2
To continue booting the MacOS type:
BYE<return>
To continue booting from the default boot device type:
BOOT<return>
 ok
0 > setenv load-base 600000  ok
0 > setenv real-base F00000  ok
0 > boot scsi/sd@1:0 -a
>> NetBSD/macppc OpenFirmware Boot, Revision 1.2
>> (matt@duel.local, Thu Nov 16 17:26:57 PST 2000)
Boot: scsi/sd@3:0,NETBSDRA.GZ
open scsi/sd@3:0,NETBSDRA.GZ: Input/output error
open scsi/sd@3:0,NETBSDRA.GZ/netbsd: Input/output error
Boot: scsi/sd@3:0,netbsd.ram.gz
open scsi/sd@3:0,netbsd.ram.gz: No such file or directory
open scsi/sd@3:0,netbsd.ram.gz/netbsd: No such file or directory
Boot: scsi/sd@3:0,NETBSD.RAM
open scsi/sd@3:0,NETBSD.RAM: Input/output error
open scsi/sd@3:0,NETBSD.RAM/netbsd: Input/output error