At 12:46 PM -0500 8/1/01, David Burgess wrote:
>"Henry B. Hotz" wrote:
> >
> > At 4:33 PM -0500 7/28/01, Dave Burgess wrote:
> > >In OF, the screen looks fine.  When I try to boot NetBSD off the .fs
> > >floppy, it looks fine (for the few seconds the boot works).  In MacOS,
> > >it's unreadable.
> >
> > I'm really surprised there's a difference between OF and netbsd on
> > this hardware.  They both drive the same fixed frequency output and I
> > didn't think netbsd had the capability of changing the output
> > frequencies, yet.
> >

I take if from the lack of mention that you solved your monitor 
problem as well.

>Success!  On to the Good News:
>
>Here are the steps I had to take:
>
>1)  Get permission from Apple to put up a 'dd' version of the Disk
>Tools diskette.  Almost all of the problem I had early on were the lack
>of a PC/Unix tool friendly boot disk.  Without this step, all the
>rest of the stuff in the FAQ is (almost) useless.

You know a couple of weeks ago I posted that I had had success 
booting from an MS-DOS floppy (created on a Mac I admit) where you 
just copy ofwboot.xcf and netbsd.ram.gz onto the floppy (the latter 
renamed as netbsd.gz to fit the DOS 8.3 name limit).  Then you can 
boot with "boot fd:1,ofwboot.xcf netbsd.gz".  Note that this won't 
work with a 0 partition number because there is no useful Mac boot 
block.

Since we're mostly Mac users to begin with the overhead of dealing 
with Mac file types on non-mac systems hasn't been such a big deal 
for us.  OTOH the above is not only a bit simpler than using SunTar 
or DiskCopy, but also very friendly to non-Mac users.  Could you give 
it a try so Mike W. gets another data point?

>2)  Get this MacOS bootable disk onto a floppy.
>
>3)  Update the firmware and set up Open Firmware to stop.  Without
>access to MacOS, this would be step 1, but the method changes to
>"hook up a PC to the serial port and type the following:"

So what MacOS tool did you use to get into OF, and how did you get 
that tool onto a MacOS floppy?  There is a bit of a catch-22 there.

>Note that the terminals I tried (a VT-102 and a VT-220) did not support
>the 38400 terminal speed that the Mac uses.
>
>4)  Put that disk away for a while.
>
>5)  Get one of the old install disks (I grabbed from from 2000).
>
>6)  Put that on a floppy and boot from that.
>
>7)  Don't bother trying to install.
>
>8)  Put in the 1.5.1 install floppy.
>
>9)  Power cycle the machine.  The machine will now boot from the
>floppy that I couldn't get working during the previous week.  I
>happened to have a 'bootable' CD (from which I couldn't boot)
>with all of the 1.5.1 distribution stuff on it, so I used that
>for the installation.

???????  So all you did was boot from the old floppy and then the new 
floppy worked?

>10)  Install NetBSD.
>
>11)  Hook up the network and off we go.

Well, good in the end anyway.

> > > > >4)  It is not possible to 'start' NetBSD without at least one working
> > > > >computer already available.  Apparently, this working computer will
> > > > >need to be a Mac as well.
> > > >
> > > > Actually I think you can do what you need to do from the iso CD-ROM
> > > > if you never want to run MacOS.  Of course you need a working monitor
> > > > if you don't want to run headless in netbsd.
> > >
> > >Eventually, that's exactly what I want to do.  I'm interested in this
> > >as a showcase piece for NetBSD on my local network, not really for me
> > >to use.  I already have enough computing power to find my own
> > >extraterrestrials - this is more of an exercise to see how the other
> > >half lives....
> > >
>
>Point 4 above still holds true.  Without access to Mac, this entire
>process is challenging (as it stands right now).
>
>The bridge is a real filesystem image of an acceptable boot image
>that can be processed using PC or Unix tools.
>
>I talked to Apple on the phone, and while they don't support putting
>a boot image for 7.5 up on the Internet somewhere, they aren't
>opposed to people passing these around amongst ourselves.  They used
>to have an image available on their web site, but have since pulled
>it down.  Even then, it assumed a MacOS system to build the floppy.

See my note on a MS-DOS boot floppy above.

> > > > f)  Allow sysinst to format your disk.  This will replace the Apple
> > > > Partition Map with a dummy one that can boot the machine and put a
> > > > native NetBSD disklabel on the disk.  If you don't have/want MacOS
> > > > then sysinst is your friend.  (Otherwise it's kind of a pain because
> > > > it won't partition the disk the way I want.)
> > >
> > >Cool.  This was good news.   This is where I eventually want to be.
> >
> > What you probably really want to do is have two disks on a machine.
> > The big one gets this treatment.  A little one gets set up as a
> > bootable MacOS disk.
>
>This, by the way, is where I am right now.  I've loaded the disk with
>the tgz files from the web site and have unloaded them all.
>
>
> > Perhaps you should try to get an older version of the Disk Tools
> > floppy?  Or, better if you have a small MacOS disk (as suggested
> > above) then format it; drag the entire contents of the disk tools
> > floppy to it;  and boot from it.  Then you don't need to eject your
> > boot disk and everything may work OK.  Then you also don't need to
> > worry about netbsd reformatting the other disk.
> >
>
>I was having a real conceptual problem with this.  As it turns out,
>it's not required.  NetBSD is loaded and I can almost boot from the
>hard drive.

I'm not quite sure what your conceptual problem is.  Could you be 
more specific?  Is it the idea of having two different kinds of 
partition map on two different drives?

NetBSD can boot from and disklabel disks with native (SunOS like) 
partitioning.  MacOS can boot from and partition disks with an Apple 
Partition Map.  NetBSD can use Apple Partition Maps, but can't edit 
them nor can it boot from such disks, yet.

>The problem I'm having now is that the 1.5.1 kernel is locking up
>during load.  I can't say precisely why or where (I'm not at that
>computer) but it does it on every kernel image I've tried for 1.5.1.
>It would help if I knew what the boot-up memory map meant.
>
>If stops at something like
>
>0000000+[000000+0000000
>
>Where the last number is 10000, I think.  I've got more resources I
>can apply to that problem, though, so I'll just keep at that one.

At the risk of sounding unhelpful, how sure are you that this is good 
hardware?  This problem sounds strange to me.

> > Here you have to have this tiny boot partition that also has to be
> > root?  All because of some 20-year-old software interface that you
> > can't change because there isn't anyone that owns the standard?
> >
>
>Yeah, that is a problem.  It, unfortunately, is a model that's both
>historical and well understood.  This model goes back to the roots
>of MS-DOS and it's natural similarity to CP/M.  The current OSes
>(Windows 2000, for example) still uses the 'load the first sector
>off the boot drive' model that was established by CP/M and other
>systems before that.

It's not the "load first sector and jump to it" that I have a problem 
with.  68k Mac's and OF Macs using "partition zero" booting both do 
the same thing.  It's the restrictions on what boot prom support are 
available to that program that I have a problem with.  Looking at the 
i386 install instructions leads me to believe that there may be an 
alternate disk addressing mode (called LBA) that might work and avoid 
the restrictions I was talking about.

Of course what I really want is root&usr on sd0a and I'm using an 
Adaptec 2940UW from a Mac on the PC so there is no boot prom support 
for the controller at all.  I probably have to put a custom kernel on 
wd0a that is pre-configured with root where I want it, but that is 
such an ugly solution.

It happens to be the same ugly solution that I think you are 
currently stuck with on OF 1.0.5 machines if you want to have both 
MacOS and NetBSD on the same (perhaps only) hard disk.  You make a 
boot CD with a pre-configured kernel.

Anyone got better solutions?

> > I got a PC to run netbsd on without having to reboot my wife's Mac,
> > but I'll think real hard about it before doing that again.  In other
> > words we both have our biases on hardware.  ;-)
>
>That's not exactly the problem.  I"m not unhappy about the Mac
>hardware.  I'm unhappy about the way the process to get the OS
>loaded required the OS to be loaded.  Hopefully, I can fix some
>of that later.

Well I think you can do it with a terminal running 38.4KBaud, and an 
MS-DOS floppy (with network access) or the NetBSD CD-ROM on OF 1.0.5 
machines.  In the end isn't that how you actually did it?  I'm not 
sure I understood your comments above.

On OF 3 machines it's simpler since you don't need the terminal and 
you can use a MacOS disk instead of the CD if you're careful about 
how you partition it before you put MacOS on it.  Not having access 
to one I know nothing about OF 2.x machines.  On non-OF powermac's 
you're SOL unless you want to switch to MkLinux.


Cross my heart, strike me dead, stick a lobster on my head.
John Crichton -- Farscape, 6/15/01
h.b.hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu