Installing NetBSD on an iBook G4

[Alexander Klein <xelalex_maker%web.de@localhost>]

Hi,

having played a bit with FreeBSD on my old iBook G4, I decided to try 
NetBSD, which I had already used some twenty years ago on my old 68k-Macs.

I remember that back in the day there were certain peculiarities during 
installation, which seem to have sent me into an infinite loop right now:

Before trying NetBSD, I had already cleaned the disk of the iBook of 
anything related to OSX in favour of FreeBSD, and this seems to result 
in certain problems, which I cannot figure out how to circumvent:

Unless I misunderstood it completely, INSTALLATION.more says that 
OpenFirmware should be able to boot the machine from an MS-DOS 
partition, but I am stuck initialising the disk properly.

I managed to create a set of partitions with fdisk, but I do not know 
how to make sysinst or disklabel see them, let alone which devices to 
use to initialise any kind of filesystem there.

newfs_msdos was apparently able to create a filesystem in partition 0, 
which seems to get mapped to /dev/wd0a, but as far as the other 
partitions are concerned, I could not get any useful results. /dev/wd0b 
is inaccessible, and the harddisk as a whole seems to be mapped to 
/dev/wd0c.

The manual for fdisk points to a program called mbrlabel, which should 
be able to update disklabels from the MBR-partition-scheme, but it is 
not on the install media.

Is there really not 'self contained' way to get NetBSD up and running 
using the ISO alone?

Best regards,

	Alexander

P.s.: Another annoyance is that the kernel used on the installation 
medium does not shut down devices properly, when issuing a "halt". As a 
result, the harddisk does not park the heads properly, and instead 
performs an emergency retract upon getting cut off from power, which is 
needlessly hard on the (old) mechanics. Is there any way to avoid this?