Subject: Re: Which kernel? Where does the ramdisk come from?
To: Henry B. Hotz <hotz@jpl.nasa.gov>
From: Bob Nestor <rnestor@augustmail.com>
List: port-macppc
Date: 07/10/2000 19:45:16
Henry B. Hotz wrote:

>Erp. . . Would that be me? (What's the emoticon for embarrassment?) 
>No, maybe not since I actually paid for a CD that wouldn't use up 
>upload time, just download.  <whew>
>
Nope.  It was a macppc user, not one of us old mac68k retreads. ;-)  As I 
recall the person in question wanted me to build the ISO image and make 
it available for him at no cost which I did hoping to get some useful 
feedback.

>I couldn't get macppc to boot from the CD, but I wasn't sure why.  I 
>think I didn't say anything because I wanted to do some more testing 
>to figure out why.
>
The CD I created for you didn't have an HFS part on it, only ISO9660.  At 
the time I was using an older version of mkhybrid that didn't support 
putting HFS partitions on the CD. Somewhere I thought I'd seen a note 
that the Boot ROMs expect to find an HFS partition table or something 
like that.

>I know I burned a test CD with ofwboot.xcf on it in the top level and 
>was able to load ofwboot from it on one of my two OF 1.0.5 machines a 
>long time ago.  The trouble is that I have not been able to duplicate 
>my early success.  I'm pretty sure I did *not* set the famous 
>load-base variable when I got it to work b.t.w.  Also ofwboot was at 
>the top level, but I don't remember what Toast options I used, and I 
>didn't keep the test CD that worked.
>
I'm just guessing, but what we might need to do is build a CD with both 
HFS and ISO9660 parts to fake out the boot ROMs.  I'm not sure where the 
ofwboot file would go (HFS or ISO9660 side), how I can get it on the HFS 
side with mkhybrid (probably can't), or how to deal with the problem of 
the two variants of the file.

>As an unpaid plug let me say that Bob's CD-ROM's are worth a lot more 
>than the $5 that he charges for them, even if you don't ask for 
>custom work.  I'm currently running a PC and a IIcx off of the two 
>that I bought from him a long time ago.  Now if I could just find a 
>way to make an 8500 dual-boot without having a working ppc machine to 
>develop/test boot code on. . .

Thanks!  Actually I bumped the price to $7.50 per CD recently to come 
closer to covering my costs, but I think it's still a reasonable price.  
And I think I'm still the only one producing CDs with snapshots of the 
packages system.

-bob