On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 07:14:27PM -0400, josh@ssimr.com wrote:
> The question then is -- "How?" When I originally asked about this, the
> problem was that I had downloaded the image and burned a CD-R. I could
> access the installation using the boot floppy image, but I could never
> boot directly off the CD. I was trying on a PowerMac 6500/300 which
> has an IDE Hard Disk but a SCSI CD. It runs OFW 2.0.3. Tell me what to
> try to get it to boot. I would not be surprised if I had some typos.

well, there is an issue of wording.  It is "bootable" it doesn't "boot"
though.  Its clearly odd to anyone who hasn't delt with an interactive
bootmanaging rom like OpenFirmware.

Basically the way an older mac is set up the CD will not boot because the OF
is set to boot through the apple rom, which in turn doesn't boot anything that
doesn't look like a mac system.

So you have to drop into OF and boot the CD yourself.  Unfortunately this is
not as simple as as typing "boot CD" or anything.  It changes with OF
versions, but look at:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/faq.html#boot-cd

there you'll see how to boot the CD.  note that you need to setup load-base
and real-base properly as specified earlier in the faq.  I think your model
properly supports the kbd and display devices, so you shouldn't need to use
a serial terminal.

typing "boot ata/atapi-disk:0,ofwboot.xcf -a" might do the trick.

Also note, that with my image I found that supplying a kernel name of "netbsd"
didn't work.  I had to use "netbsd.macppc" I don't recall why.

it sure would be nice if something like ya-boot worked for netbsd machines.
But then netbsd would have to have it's own console and not rely on
open-firware's.

-Daniel