Re: Netbooting a blue and white G3

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 9:25 AM, Flavio Donadio 
<flavio%donadio.com.br@localhost> wrote:
> 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?

And here's yet another idea:

If one can stand leaving the install CD in the drive, or otherwise
booting the ofwboot.xcf from another location, the machine can be
booted standalone if the kernel is configured to boot directly from
wd0a. You need to build a kernel with this line in the config file:

config          netbsd     root on wd0a type ffs

If this exists in the root disk, then it's possible to boot my machine
like this:

boot cd:,ofwboot.xcf ultra0:0/netbsd

And away we go.

I'm still not super duper happy with this because like all other
methods, it requires another machine to do preparation. I like it a
bit more than other methods because you don't need pkgsrc to do this,
you just need the source tree. But you need a CD or a netboot machine
to load ofwboot.xcf, which isn't so nice.

Anyways, I hope we can actually fix this at some point. I'll keep
working on it as long as I am able.

Andy