Hello,

I should firstly say that I have a fair amount of experience with BSD
(FreeBSD) and Linux, but pretty much none with Mac's of any variety.

I have been given a PowerBook G3, which I'd like to get NetBSD going
on, as I think OSX will be too sluggish.

I have no floppy drive, just a DVD ROM.

I can successfully boot the installation CD, and even install the
OS. No problems there. But I can't boot what I've installed.

Now, the install documentation indicates that booting without a
Macintosh filesystem on the disk may be a problem with openfirmware
3.0 (which I have).

I tried during the install making an MS-DOS partition, formatting it
and copying the ofwboot.xcf and netbsd kernel files over to
it. Indeed, at the openfirmware prompt I can see the files:

0 > dir hd:1,\
      57672   09-09-1902 02:28:40 OfWBOOT.XCF
    2382865   09-09-1902 02:28:38 NETBSD

However I can't boot them:

boot hd:1,\OFWBOOT.XCF load-size=800 adler32=8ef869c3

loading XCOFF

tsize=cbc0 dsize=14a8 bsize=2670 entry=640000
SECTIONS:
.text   00640000  00640000  0000cbc0  000000e0
.data   0064d000  0064d000  000014a8  0000cca0
.bss    0064e4a8  0064e4a8  00002670  00000000
loading .text

CLAIM failed

However the documentation regarding CLAIM failed is not helpful, just
telling me to not try certain fixes under openfirmware 3. So I didn't :-)

One thing I don't understand, is that 'dir hd:4,\' has the same effect
as 'dir hd:1,\', as indeed does any positive integer.

Also disturbing for me, is that after I try that boot command, a boot
command which I know should work (like 'boot cd:,\ofwboot.xcf') also
fails, though if I issue a 'reset-all' it works again. This sort of
failure makes it rather hard for me to try stuff, if any invalid try
cause all further tries from working.

The only thing in the install file that seems relevant is:

"This has only been thoroughly tested on floppy disks, but may work on
FDISK-formatted hard drives. This does not work for MS-DOS partitions
on a hard drive with an Apple Partition Map."

I'm assuming I don't have an 'Apple Parition Map' since I let the
NetBSD installer blow away the lot when it installed. Maybe I'm not
understanding this right.

Am I out of luck with this configuration? Do I really need to do some
sort of install of MacOS to get this going? If so, what's the minimum
I need to do?

I also tried reinstalling and putting my msdos partition at the end of
the disk rather than the beginning. OFW can't see it at all now,
though after the install process I could happily newfs, mount and copy
files to it.

Slightly lost in the woods here :-)

Thanks in Advance for any help anyone can offer.

Regards,

    Justin

-- 
justin@hawkins.id.au  |    "Don't sweat it --
http://hawkins.id.au  |  it's only 1's and 0's"