The following are issues and questions I have with respect to apparent 
contradictions and missing or missed (by me) info.

Preparing a custom hybrid HFS/ISO9660 CD-R

This section describes how to create your own bootable NetBSD/macppc 
CD-R. We recommend that you use the official NetBSD/macppc-1.6.2 CD-R 
image, as described in the section above.

Place ofwboot.xcf and the installation kernel netbsd-GENERIC_MD.gz at 
the top level of the CD. Make sure that the bootloader is present on 
the HFS partition, and the kernel is on both the ISO9660 and HFS 
partitions. Due to restrictions in the way that Open Firmware deals 
with ISO filenames, you may wish to name your kernel netbsd.gz. You may 
also place the NetBSD1.6.2 distribution sets on the ISO9660 partition 
(not only on the HFS partition).

??????---->
Open Firmware 1.0.5 and 2.0.x machines will not boot from the ISO9660 
file system if you create a hybrid HFS/ISO format CD-R. Make sure that 
the CD only has ISO9660 data and does not have an Apple Partition Map.
<----??????

Open Firmware 2.0.x and Open Firmware 2.4 systems will set the 
real-base environment variable to its default value (which prevents 
NetBSD from booting) if you boot into MacOS 9 or earlier.
ISO9660 CD-ROM file system

This is the machine I'm trying to install NetBSD on:

MODEL: PowerBook 3400
CPU/speed: 603e/180, 200, 240
Logic Board code name: Hooper
OF version: 2.0.1	
Remarks:
Internal HD boot-device /bandit/ohare/ata/ata-disk@0:0
may need to zap PRAM before entering Open Firmware
on-board ethernet may not work

This Powerbook has a drive bay that accepts either the floppy drive 
insert or the CDROM drive insert or a ZIP drive insert. since these 
share a bus (I presume) it is not clear what represents the cdrom drive 
when it is being used in the machine. The machine also has PCMCIA card 
slots and I don't know how to decipher their alias (though I suspect 
they are attached to the PCI bus).

General sequence of events:
situation; I have a Powerbook 3400c/180 that I have installed a dual 
boot system with Mac OS 9 and SuSE linux for PPC v7.1.
I wanted to install NetBSD as the sole OS on this machine.
I obtained and began reading the PPC_INSTALL.html. I obtained the 
macppccd.iso (cd image) (It didn't complete downloading; Internet 
Explorer's download manager had it as 'waiting for data' with 2 MB to 
go. It appeared to be intact, though. I downloaded it to a MAC OSX 10.3 
system. I installed Toast on the machine but the OSX version didn't 
display a window. It appeared to run in the background.)
After many attempts to enter Open firmware on the Powerbook, I realized 
I had misread the instructions and corrected it. In the mean time I had 
obtained the utility for entering OWF.
I tried to start up from the OS 9 install cd to use drive setup to 
format the hard drive and the machine refused to boot from the install 
cd. I solved the problem by holding down shift (turning off extentions) 
and the machine booted into the install OS 9 cd. I created a small 
partition in HFS+ format for the ofwboot.xcf file. When I tried to boot 
into the the install cd OFW ignored it and tried to boot normal and  
couldn't find a usable system folder on the small HFS+ partition, so I 
went back to the install OS 9 cd and did a minimal install of OSX.

I found I was missing the setenv load-base 600000 and setenv real-base 
f00000 step.I did this and the system still ignored the   Netbsd 
install cd, even with the setenv auto-boot? false command so it 
wouldn't try to boot into MacOS and loose the new env setiings when 
reset-all was issued.

There appear to be several issues:

The boot syntax in incorrect because I'm not getting what the target 
device should be referenced as for OFW,

The CD image has hybrid HFS+/iso9660 file system and won't boot on my 
OFW 2.0.1 machine.

The cd is missing data (the last 2 MB?)

I tried dir (in OFW) on several dev aliases and got responses like DIR 
failed
and can't read such and such, When I did it on scsi-int/sc@0, OFW froze 
with stack overflow error message.

I tried dev scsi-int and list children and go "DEFAULT CATCH".... as 
the response. I thought this was because I had set the cd as the 
startup drive.

As far as the Apple System Profiler is concerned it also doesn't know 
exactly what bus the cd is attached to.

I know a CDROM drive and a Zip drive can use the scsi bus (internal in 
this case) but the floppy drive? I thought floppy drives had their own 
bus. I know floppy drives on other machines, Macs in particular, can't 
be shared over a network. So, how is this issue resolved?

I'm determined to get this going because there are several other 
machines that I want to install and use NetBSD on.

Thanks for your time: I've already spent a lot more of my time than I 
really would have liked to.
J.E.Killen
jekillen@prodigy.net

p.s.: computers have taught me patience, self reliance, diplomacy, 
persistence, and self criticism, and have wasted lots of my time. Can 
you help me save some time?