Subject: Re: Booting a Beige G3 266mhz (OF 2.4) box (was "Re: Install problems
To: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org>
From: Kevin Keith Woo <kkwoo@sdf1.org>
List: port-macppc
Date: 09/29/2002 04:48:43
Hi Bill,

    Sorry I took so long to respond. I've been a bit occupied and this is the first chance I've had to try the latest suggestion.

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Bill Studenmund wrote:

>
> One problem you'll run into is that ofwboot parses the boot device to get
> the location of a device to try loading the boot file from. I don't think
> it's going to correctly understand a ":" not followed by a digit.
>

If I remove the ":0" from the boot-device environment variable, I get "loader: unrecognised client program format" errors, which indicate that OF 2.4 can't find OFWBOOT.XCF. Yet if I add ":0" or ":1" (I tried ":1" recently), OFWBOOT.CXF appears to load, because I now see:

open ide1/disk@0:1,\NETBSD_G.GZ: No such file or directory
Boot:

At the "Boot:" prompt, I can type in a file name, but it appears that regardless of the filename I give, I will proceed to receive:

no active packageWarning: unexpected short transfer 0/10240
Warning: unexpected short transfer 0/10240
Warning: unexpected short transfer 0/10240
Warning: unexpected short transfer 0/10240
Warning: unexpected short transfer 0/10240
Warning: unexpected short transfer 0/10240
Warning: unexpected short transfer 0/10240
<ad infinitum>

> Try ":1". The colon indicates that we're giving a partition number to load
> from. To have the colon and not give a partition number will confuse a
> number of the different bits of code along the way, and you'll be
> encountering error-case behavior.
>

As mentioned above I added ":1" to the boot-device parameter, to the boot-file parameter, both separately and together. Neither ":0" and ":1" seems to have worked.

Depending on your patience and mine, it appears we'll be a while before we can get a successful boot (unless someone whose booted an OF 2.4 machine gives us some vital tips). I'm willing to continue with this machine (I've no choice, really (: ). Are you willing to continue this journey with me? (:

Regards,

    Kevin

kkwoo@sdf1.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org