Re: Installing NetBSD on an iBook G4

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

Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Apr 2017 16:56:10 +0200
> 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.
> 
> It can read MSDOS filesystems, the package is there, but I never
> succeeded to make it actually find one. Most likely I didn't give it
> the right partition type or something. Or it only reads them from
> fdisk partitions, which I didn't try since I wanted to keep the
> apple partitioning.

When I've got a spare mini I spent quite a bit of time trying various
things.  I didn't have that luxury when I installed the previous one
and needed it online asap, so after a couple of failed attempts I just
used the ISO trick and moved on.

So as I said in my previous mail, it looks like OFW only recognizes
the FAT partition when the disk uses MBR.  I didn't actually try to
verify that by reading the OFW code b/c apple, unlike sun, is nasty
about stripping word names from its OFW, making "see" mostly useless.

-uwe