Re: Installing NetBSD on an iBook G4

[uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost (Valery Ushakov)]

Alexander Klein <xelalex_maker%web.de@localhost> wrote:

> 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.

E.g. on my test g4 mini:

$ fdisk
Disk: /dev/rwd0c
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 193821, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 195371568, bytes/sector: 512

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1024, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 195371568

Partitions aligned to 16065 sector boundaries, offset 63

Partition table:
0: Primary DOS with 32 bit FAT (sysid 11)
    start 63, size 4195233 (2048 MB, Cyls 0-261/36/63)
1: NetBSD (sysid 169)
    start 4195296, size 191176272 (93348 MB, Cyls 261/37/1-12161/80/63)
        PBR is not bootable: Bad magic number (0x7365)
2: <UNUSED>
3: <UNUSED>

$ disklabel wd0
[...]
16 partitions:
#        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
 a: 182787696   4195296     4.2BSD   2048 16384     0  # (Cyl.   4162 - 185498)
 b:   8388576 186982992       swap                     # (Cyl. 185499 - 193820)
 c: 195371568         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 - 193820)
 h:   4195233        63      MSDOS                     # (Cyl.      0*-   4161)

Where the small FAT partition only contains ofwboot* files.


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

IIRC, i created the layout manually, dropping into shell from the
install cd.

Do NOT use pdisk.  I was unable to convince OFW to recognize the FAT
partition if Apple partition table was present, so you want disk to
use MBR.

You do fdisk first and create the FAT and the NetBSD MBR partitions.
Then you use disklabel (the first time around you will need -I iirc)
to split MBR NetBSD partition into, well, netbsd partitions and also
add the netbsd partition for the FAT MBR partition ("h" in the example
above).

Then you can newfs_msdos the FAT (wd0h) partition and copy ofwboot* to
it.

I think at that point you can just run sysinst and accept existing
layout when it asks.

boot-device=hd:,\ofwboot.elf (there is a bug that makes ofwboot.xcf
fail)

-uwe