The syntax is

  boot device[:partition][,filename] [arguments]


The device can either be one of the devices listed by "devaliases"
(hd, cd, enet, etc), or a full openfirmware path. ("dev / ls" will
list the device tree.)

Openfirmware path elements are separated by slashes, and each element
can be specified either by name, by an address preceded by an @ sign,
or by both. My hard drive is "/pci/@d/@3/@2": "@d" is short for
"pci-bridge@d", "3" is the PCI device number of the SCSI card on the
PCI bridge, and "2" is the SCSI device number of the hard drive.

> > Well, I did this, and I have installed NetBSD on a separate drive (which is
> > connected as the slave device on the bus that hosts the CD).

In that case, the device path would be the same as is listed for "cd"
in the devaliases output, but with the final device number switched.
(I don't remember if "0" is master and "1" is slave or the other way
around.)


The partition in the boot command is only meaningful if you have a Mac
partition table on the disk. "0" is always the "raw partition", which
means the whole disk. You can see what the other partitions are by
looking at your disk with a MacOS disk partitioning tool. On the
pre-installed MacOS disk in my machine, partition 5 is the one with
the data on it (and the others have various bookkeeping stuff).


You can only specify a filename if the disk is in a format ofw knows
about, which is one of HFS(plus), MS-DOS, ISO9660, and I think
something else I'm forgetting. ("dev /packages ls" will show you: the
filesystem packages are the ones with names ending in "-files".)


The arguments are passed on to the program you're booting. You can
pass a kernel "-a" (ask for root location), "-d" (enter ddb at
startup), or "-s" (single user mode). If you're booting ofwboot, you
can pass it any of those things ("-a" means ofwboot will stop and ask
you what file to boot rather than assuming "netbsd") and you can also
pass it another filename telling it what file to boot.

-- Dan