Re: Netbooting a blue and white G3

[Flavio Donadio <flavio%donadio.com.br@localhost>]

Andy,


I just got an idea.

In the installer's partioning process, it should create, no matter  
what, a small HFS partition for the bootloader. On the CD, there would  
be a disk image file that would be written, block for block, to the  
HFS partition created before.

This block copy process would eliminate the requirement for hfsutils  
on the install CD.

People: what do you think?


Cheers,
Flavio

On 16/10/2009, at 13:13, Andy Ruhl wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 8:52 AM, Marco Trillo  
> <marcotrillo%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> > I think it will be easier if you create an Apple partition table,  
> > with
> > the pdisk(8) utility, and not a MBR table. Instead of a small MSDOS
> > partition you can create a small HFS partition (type Apple_HFS) from
> > which OF will be able to load the 'ofwboot.xcf' file.
> >
> > (To format the HFS partition, and copy the 'ofwboot.xcf' file, you  
> > can
> > either use the 'hfsutils' package (in pkgsrc as 'sysutils/hfsutils')
> > or Mac OS.)
> >
> > That way, if you create your NetBSD partitions with the
> > Apple_UNIX_SVR2 partition type and set the "BZB bits" as asked by the
> > pdisk(8) tools there should be no need to create a disklabel  
> > manually.
>
> Eventually I will try this, but my goal right now is to try to get a
> machine to install and boot with only an install CD and nothing else.
> I don't want to have to do anything special in OSX or another NetBSD
> machine to try to make it boot.
>
> I just sent out another mail to the list.
>
> Andy