I am sort of confused right now as to what I could be doing wrong. I have
no floppy disk and my hfs partition that holds my linux bootloader is only
1 meg so the floppy image won't fit. Therefore the only way for me to
install would be via the iso image on a cd.

I have burned the cd with cdrecord under linux and inspected it to make
sure it burned correctly. On the cd I found ofwboot.xcf at the root and
then both ofwboot.xcf and ofwboot.elf in the directory
/macppc/installation. So I tried booting them all like it said on the
website...

boot cd:,/ofwboot.xcf
boot cd:,/macppc/installation/ofwboot.xcf
boot cd:,/macppc/installation/ofwboot.elf

For each of these commands it would say "Cannot read ..." and return to
the prompt. I have I checked the firmware version and when I enter the
firmware prompt it says

Apple PowerBook4, 1 4.2.0f4 BootRom

I don't know exactly what those numbers mean but it seems like my firmware
would be considered version 4 which does satisfy the requirement of >3
which is given on the platform page.

So this is basically everything I have tried but it seems like according
to the documentation it should work. Am I missing anything?



Ryan Boder
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~rtb

On 8 Oct 2001, Nathan J. Williams wrote:

>
> Ryan Boder <boder@cmu.edu> writes:
>
> > I would like to install netbsd on my ibook2. Right now it contains
> > partitions for the apple drivers (but no macos) and my linux partitions. I
> > saved a 1.7G partition for netbsd to be installed.
>
> This should be fine. Unfortunately, I didn't save my instructions on
> how to do this, so this is going a little from memory...
>
> > My first problem is that I burned a CD from the iso image and it would not
> > boot via the instructions on the web site. Have other people done that on
> > an ibook2?
>
> Haven't tried the CD install for NetBSD.
>
> > Are there other ways to install on an ibook2? I would do a net install but
> > you need a floppy for that right?
>
> "sort of". I put ofwboot.xcf and the floppy image on my HFS partition
> and booted from there; that let me do a net install (over the wired
> ethernet, in 1.5.2). If you don't have a HFS partition that won't work
> (and will be a problem long-term; you need a HFS partition to store
> the bootloader).
>
> > Also I thought I read somewhere that netbsd must use the whole disk to
> > work properly right now. Is that true or will I be able to share it with
> > my existing Linux installation?
>
> The sysinst install procedure in 1.5.2 wants to use the entire
> disk. You have to cheat somewhat (it's described in the install
> notes), manually newfs the filesystems, and then tell sysinst to do an
> upgrade, rather than an install.
>
>         - Nathan
>