Re: experience with netbsd-7

[Adrian Christiansen <adrian.christiansen%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi Greg!

You Mac can actually boot the ofwboot.xcf and kernel of a MS-DOS
partition. All the tools required are on the installation CD. There's
fdisk on the install CD and newfs_msdos. You'll have to copy
ofwboot.xcf and the kernel into the MS-DOS partition manually but
that's alright.

Here's a few of the steps you'll have to do:
1) Exit the Install to a Shell.
2) fdisk the hard drive to create a primary MS-DOS partition and a
partition for the NetBSD slices (the ones you put in with disklabel,
you also need an entry for the MS-DOS partition in the disklabel, so
you can mount it from NetBSD). The MS-DOS partition doesn't need to be
larger than 15-20 MB, it does however have to be FAT16, as far as I
can tell.
3) Manually create a disklabel, this is what I did to make it work.
Might be a way to use the installers disklabel tool, haven't checked.
Remember to put your / parition as a:, this will automatically mounted
as the root filesystem when the kernel reads the disklabel, and swap
should be b:, dump file.
4) Use newfs_msdos to format the MS-DOS partition with a FAT16 filesystem.

So, let me recap: You need an MBR tabel on your drive, fdisk will
creat this. With a primary FAT16 partition and a primary partition for
the NetBSD slices, as defined by the disklabel. The a: slice in the
disklabel have to be the root filesystem for NetBSD, for the kernel to
automatically mount it. Don't forget to copy ofwboot.xcf and the
kernel (netbsd) into the MS-DOS partition.

Best of luck!, it's not easy but take your time and try again if you fail :)

2014-10-26 23:45 GMT+01:00 Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>:
>
> I am new to netbsd/macppc.  I have previously run on i386, amd64, sparc,
> sparc64, very slightly on evbarm, and sort of on evbppc.
>
> I built a netbsd-7 macppc iso with build.sh (really BUILD-NetBSD, which
> calls build.sh).  I tried it on a 2005ish iBook G4 (PowerBook 6,7, 1.42
> GHz single core, 512MB ram, 60G disk, with a freshly nuked working 10.5
> os x install).
>
> My boot rom version is 4.9.3f0, says os x.
>
> 1) My first problem was the boot syntax.
> I was boggled by the ,\ bit but then I read the faq.
> I found that "dir cd:," was incredibly helpful. Probably INSTALL.txt
> should tell people to do that and copy the file name, rather than giving
> what usually works (or in addition).
>
> What worked for me was
>
>  boot cd:,OFWBOOT.XCF;1
>
> but with a \ might have worked too.   I am pretty sure that with
> netbsd.macppc afterwards it did not work.
>
> It then proceeded to load the kernel, and the system came up.
>
> 2) My second problem is that the install disk offered to use the whole
> disk, but apparently I need an HFS partition with ofwboot.xcf, and it
> didn't set that up.  So my installation was apparently unbootable, but
> maybe I'm doing something else wrong.  Do I really have to set up the
> disk manually with that first, and then use the netbsd partition as an
> install target?
>