"Amitai Schlair" <schmonz@schmonz.com> wrote:

> Thinking it might be a netboot-related problem, I found my NetBSD
> Mission 1.5 CD. It booted and installed!
> 
> I figured that now that I've got a partition-zero bootloader and a
> working system, I can upgrade to 1.6 from there. However, I'm stuck on
> the ages-old problem of booting from a beige G3's internal ATA drive.
> Without fail, it says "can't LOAD from this device". The hard disk
> doesn't sound spun up, so I can't blame OF for not being able to boot
> from it.

I'm not sure exactly what did it, but I've now got 1.6_RC3 installed and
booting from the internal drive. Here's what I did, in case it helps
someone:

Bill Studenmund suggested off-list that I try a throwaway installation of
Mac OS X to see if it patched Open Firmware into a better state. I booted
the OS X install CD, which caused the machine to reboot several times (to
adjust OF settings, I presume), but when I was prompted to select the
destination disk, the internal hard disk didn't appear in the list. Figuring
the OF was probably already patched by the install CD, I gave up on
finishing the OS X install.

Next, I booted my NetBSD 1.5 install CD again. This time, I let it carve up
the partitions itself. Also, I tricked it into installing the 1.6_RC3
base/etc/kern sets. When the install was done, the machine rebooted from the
hard disk into single-user mode.

Now that there was a bootable filesystem I could write to, I dropped the
1.6_RC3 install kernel in / and rebooted into it. In the 1.6_RC3 installer,
I partitioned the disk into / and swap and installed all the sets.

On rebooting, it worked!

I imagine if you have floppy and netboot troubles, a bootable 1.6 CD will
make all of this a lot easier. :-)

- Amitai