Re: Booting with root fs on another partition

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <C05524E8-847A-4DFB-B7DF-22D40A653EA9%hhhh.org@localhost>,
Wim Lewis  <wiml%hhhh.org@localhost> wrote:
>I've installed NetBSD 4.0.1, and more recently 5.0, on a PPC Mac  
>Mini. 4.0.1 works fine. And the 5.0 kernel seems to be fine. However,  
>I can't figure out how to boot 5.0 so that its root filesystem is the  
>partition containing the 5.0 userland --- it always mounts partition  
>'a' as root, which holds 4.0.1. What I want to do is have partition  
>'e' be the root when booting into 5.0. Is there  a way to do this?  
>I've tried various likely-seeming permutations of open firmware  
>commands to no avail.
>
>Looking through the kernel sources, I found these lines in  
>ofw_autoconf.c:
>
>   186                 /* booted_partition = *p - '';         XXX  
>correct? */
>
>   353                 booted_partition = 0; /* XXX -- should be  
>extracted from bootpath */
>
>which kind of make me think that there is no way to specify the  
>rootfs partition at boot time.
>
>Any ideas? Am I barking up the wrong tree? I'd rather not wipe 4.0.1  
>off of partition 'a' just yet.

Can you boot netbsd -a and type the root partition manually? Or create
a custom kernel with hard-coded root?

Someone who knows ofw, should fix it...

christos