Michael Wolfson wrote:

>At 2:26 PM -0700 10/26/00, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
>
>:)It's really nice to see someone trying to organize all this
>:)information.  Many mucho thanks!!!!!!!
>
I second this!

>:)What follows are nits.  As Bob Nestor says we need to have a simple
>:)set of instructions that will *work* before we can start exploring
>:)all the special cases.
>
>Unfortunately, after trying that, I found that OF has more exceptions than
>rules (kinda like the English language).  Instead, I broke it down into
>instructions for each different classes of OF (1.0.5 and 2.0.x, 1.1.22,
>2.4, and 3) as within each class, most everything is the same.
>
What I thought I'd said was that we should work out the details on 
"standard" machine configurations first, then deal with the special cases 
of machines that have been upgraded with different disks, interfaces and 
such.  Since Apple has released standard systems with various versions of 
OF that don't all work the same, I think this is an excellent approach.

My original statements about special case machines was based on my onw 
experience and belief that changing the machine configuration _may_ 
introduce additional problems or mask what is really happening in OF.  I 
certainly beleive that I've seen this first-hand with my B&W G3; adding 
an IDE disk to the secondary controller created a situation where the 
CDROM became unbootable, even for MacOS.  Removing the disk cleared up 
the problem.  I have a feeling that if this is happening on other's 
machines as well it make be confusing the main issue of learning how to 
use OF to boot NetBSD from disk or CD.

>:)I would suspect that you can boot from hybrid CD-ROM's if you just
>:)can figure out exactly what magic bits to set where.  Since we don't
>:)know what those bits are and since neither mkhybrid nor Toast set
>:)them properly we can't claim we support that capability if it does
>:)exist.
>
>Unfortunately, you *must* have a hybrid CD to boot an OF 3 machine.  Which
>means we can't have just one CD image to work on all macppcs.
>
>Personally, I'm leaning towards distributing a hybrid CD with the boot
>floppy image and the MacOS tool to write that to disk.  That way, they've
>got a boot floppy and a CD with the dist sets, and OF 3 people can just
>boot it.
>
Are all systems that come without a floppy OF 3 type systems?  If not, 
how does one boot up into NetBSD on a system that doesn't have OF 3 or a 
floppy?

>:)My own experience is that the machine was fine without System Disk
>:)and wouldn't boot properly after I ran it.
>
>Idunno, considering the number of models that are completely broken until
>System Disk patches them, I'd rather encourage use of it.  Then, if there
>are problems, they can just disable use-nvramrc?.  At least that way,
>System Disk figures out the screen device, sets up load-base, and has a
>non-threatening GUI.
>
I had the same experience with System Disk that Henry describes.  After 
that I'm kind of leary about using it again since I have no idea what it 
will modify.  I'd feel much more comfortable dealing with a set of 
instructions that tell me how to get into OF and set variables by hand 
and why I'm doing it.  That way I can keep a record of what they were 
before I changed them and have some hope of getting my system back if 
things don't work out.

>Any other info/suggestions?

I finally got my MacOS X CD in and I have a utility that can format and 
dump the Disk Partition tables.  Maybe this will give someone a clue 
about how to build a CD that is bootable on different systems so we can 
make the appropiate changes to mkhybrid.  Is anyone interested in a copy 
of the dump?

-bob