At 9:36 AM -0800 1/12/02, David Henderson wrote:
>I saw your note about not getting the devalias  to the CDROM drive and I
>thought I'd share my experiences with attempting to install netbsd 1.5.2 on
>a similar machine.
>
>My Apple G3 Wallstreet (PDQ) has a floppy drive and a DVDROM drive that go
>in the left and right bays, a 6 gig hard drive, an Apple ADB, and a scsi
>port. I intend to share the hard drive between NETBSD and MacOS 8.6
>
>I discovered the devalias for the floppy drive is fd2. I was able to eject
>a floppy, but never to boot off it. I used suntar to copy the BOOT.FS
>blocks.

There's a note in the FAQ or somewhere that floppy booting only works 
with the floppy in the left bay, which makes it fd2 instead of fd.  I 
never had any trouble with floppy booting as long as I used the exact 
form of the boot command in the FAQ.  I was also able to boot from an 
MS-DOS floppy with "boot fd2:1,ofwboot.xcf -a".  Never tried the 
floppy in the right bay.

I have a CD-ROM that only fits in the right bay.  Never found the 
right OF device path to boot the ISO image though.

>I used the SCSI bus to cable in some older scsi drives I own: a Sony 4x2
>CD-R writer and a LaCIE 160 megabyte hard drive. I wrote the boot.fs blocks
>to the hard drive and put the NETBSD install CD-ROM into the Sony drive. I
>am not able to do an open firmware dir command on the CDROM, nor am I able
>to use open firmware to start up OFWBOOT.XCF. The CDROM I created is not
>the "official hybrid" off the site, but is one I crafted using Toast on
>MacOS.

Never did anything with the SCSI support.

>I used a modified version of pdisk (see attachment) to create proper NETBSD
>partitions, and followed the procedure in section   6. on page 45 of the
>installation guide. I was able to format and mount root, usr and swap
>partitions OK.

I allocated the needed partitions on the internal drive when I first 
got the machine.  I think I was able to boot the internal disk by 
booting the floppy with -a, but I can't remember for sure.

>Where I'm now stuck is that I can't seem to get to the scsi Sony drive from
>within the installer.
>
>So I have the following questions:
>
>1. I really need a boot floppy that works to startup NETBSD even if I
>complete installation. My plan is to boot off floppy, then tell the boot.fs
>bootloader to load the NETBSD kernel on the hard drive stored in a
>partition in the shard hard drive. Is this a reasonable procedure? How can
>I make this happen?

Since I haven't gotten the CD-ROM to boot I'm in the same situation, I guess.

>2. What is the proper path to the boot CDROM for the installer? (Both the
>Sony scsi drive or the internal DVDROM drive)

Do a dmesg and look for the device there.  It'll be /dev/cd0 or 
/dev/cd1 so you can do a "mount /dev/cd0a /mnt" in the installer 
shell and take it from there.

>3. Is there anyone that knows the open firmware devalias for the internal
>CDROM drive for this species of powerbook? (Or failing that, how do I use
>the complete device firmware path name to boot?)

Well the complete path would be just expanding out what the devalias 
inline in the boot command.

It's worth noting that the nvalias installed by system disk includes 
code that does some kind of initialization on the 3 ide busses and 
then defines devaliases for ide#, where # is the bus number.  The 
internal HD was on ide0 or ide (I forget which was defined).  You can 
figure out what the other two are by doing a devalias and comparing 
the definition of fd and fd2 with the ide definitions.

That will get you in the right ballpark.  I suspect the path should 
be ide...@0:0,\ for a dir command, but like I said I never found what 
would work.

>4. I have one other installation possibility: installing off ethernet. Once
>I do this, how do I boot NETBSD off the shared disk without the ethernet
>umbilical?
>
>5. Do I need to give up the idea of a shard hard disk between MacOS 
>and NETBSD?

Unless someone has figured out how to put our bootxx into a real 
partition map instead of just the fake one we currently use then yes, 
we're stuck.  It takes OF3 to be able to boot ofwboot from an HFS(+) 
partition directly.  The PDQ runs OF2.

I know Bill Studenmund took a stab at it, but apparently there were 
still things to be figured out to make it work.