Subject: Re: Booting CD-ROM via Snag "C"
To: port-macppc@NetBSD.org, Bob Nestor <bob@murphy.dyndns.org>
From: Donald Lee <MacPPC@caution.icompute.com>
List: port-macppc
Date: 09/06/2004 15:23:28
Very good news!

I tried this on my G4/AGP - the one I could not get to auto-boot,
and it works fine.

I had the boot-file and boot-device set up before, so that I could boot
into OF and type "boot" and it would come up, but it would NOT
auto-boot.

I added:

	setenv boot-command " screen" output boot
	setenv auto-boot? true
	reset-all

and now it auto-boots very nicely.

Thank you, thank you!

-dgl-

P.S. I wonder if this wouldn't be a good thing to add to the install guide.
It shouldn't hurt to do this in most cases, and in some cases (mine)
it can be mighty helpful.

>The instructions for building a Snag "C" bootable CD-ROM are incomplete for many newer Macs.  These changes have allowed me to produce a CD-ROM that is Snag "C" bootable on B&W G3, eMac and 12" PowerBook.
>
>Basically Openfirmware in newer model Macs doesn't appear to enable screen output by default as older versions did.  The solution is to add the following command to the bootscript file right before the boot command:
>
>	" screen" output
>
>The quotes and leading space on "screen" appear to be required.
>
>Also the netbsd kernel file must be visible to Openfirmware.  If you copy the file to the root level directory of your CD and use the -hide-hfs-list option in mkisofs with the supplied hide-hfs-list, the kernel file will be hidden and ofwboot will be unable to find it.  My solution was to not copy the kernel file to the root level directory of the CD and modify the boot command in the bootscript to:
>
>	boot cd:,\ofwboot.xcf \macppc\binary\kernel\netbsd-INSTALL.gz
>
>Notice there is no device specifier in the kernel filename argument.  Although ofwboot indicates it will accept one it doesn't appear to work.  It seems the default boot device becomes the device that ofwboot was started from so leaving out the device specifier wrk just fine.
>
>And finally, ofwboot in -current is version 1.10 and it doesn't work on any of my systems. I've used version 1.7 which came with NetBSD-1.6.  It works fine on all the Mac systems I tested and it successfully loads -current kernels.
>
>If you try this out on your system and it doesn't work, please let me know.  Otherwise I'll get the instructions updated in the NetBSD documentation.
>
>Thanks,
>-bob