Re: Installing NetBSD on an iBook G4

[Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello,

On Thu, 13 Apr 2017 17:12:03 +0000 (UTC)
uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost (Valery Ushakov) wrote:

> 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.

We really need to teach installboot or the installer how to recognize
OF3 and make a bootable hfs partition in that case. IIRC all it takes
is plain hfs with ofwboot.xcf and a few special flags set, maybe we can
even make the fs during build, stash it in /usr/mdec and just dd it
into the right partition.

> 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.

Eww. And unsurprising.

have fun
Michael