>On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Donald Lee wrote:
>
>: Would it be cool, or what, if we could boot from CD with the 'c' key??
>:
>: Do we know enough about how Apple does this to build a bootable CD?
>: (NetBSD, or course)
>
>[I'm the one maintaining the multi-arch CD creation tools]
>
>It involves putting a CHRP script into the HFS partition containing
>automated boot info.  I have some of the info on doing this, and will be
>getting a macppc at some time in the near future to test it out.

That would be pretty cool.

>: As it is now, it is *required* to boot a kernel to do an install, and it
>: would be nice to do be able to do the install from MacOS in some cases.
>
>The official trend is toward only using the sysinst method of installation,
>not away from it.  When partition editing works properly on mac68k, the
>"Installer" for mac68k will be considered obsolete and not included with
>future releases.
>
>If you must install from MacOS, I'd have to wonder why the install kernel
>doesn't work (and whether you'd actually be able to get a standard kernel to
>boot :).

I can think of cases, though, where this would be useful.  For instance,
I had lots of trouble installing on my OF 2.4 G3 box.  If I had had
the MacOS install tools, I may have been able to get the installation
onto the SCSI drive without swapping the ROM stick to boot a floppy.

The trouble with the install on that machine was not the kernel, but
the strangenesses in the OF that made the floppy and CD at the very least
hard to use.  The MacOS install step would simply
reduce the number of hurdles to getting the kernel on a medium
(SCSI disk) that will boot.  It also strikes me as a pretty low-cost
project to get it to work.  Partition maps should be the same between
68K and MacPPC, and the file system code should be exactly the same.
If you run it in emulation (rather than compiling for PPC) the install
tools *should* "just run".

Am I crazy here?

-dgl-