Re: Installboot on Beige G3

[James Horner <humankind135%gmail.com@localhost>]

I have no way to capture the dmesg output as I can only get into the
installer and have no serial connection at the moment (I am working on
rectifying this).

Given what you have said I tried running installboot pointing at the a
partition rather than the c partition (whole disk) and this resolved
the issue around installboot asking for the -B flag. Unfortunately
this didn't help but as you had mentioned that sysinst should run
installboot during installation but I was pretty sure I didn't see it
I zeroed my disk and ran the installer rather than partitioning it in
OS9 I let sysinst do this and installboot ran during installation.
After this I was will unable to boot IDE but I then tried a disk image
using SCSI and a totally blank disk and had some further success.

Using the scsi disk it now loads bootxx similarly to the install cd
but now fails with a Failed to CLAIM PHYS error. The IDE drive still
responds with CAN'T OPEN unfortunately.

I think this now goes beyond the original subject of this thread
although any advice on how to proceed from here would be appreciated.

Thanks


On Wed, 23 Apr 2025 at 17:50, Izumi Tsutsui <tsutsui%ceres.dti.ne.jp@localhost> wrote:
>
> > I am trying to get NetBSD 10.1 installed on an Old World Beige Mac G3
> > with Openfirmware 2.0f1. I realise this is marked as difficult on the
> > model page but this is what I have so this is what I am doing!
> >
> > After Install from CD (using a Zulu SCSI) I am dropping to a shell and running:
> >
> > # installboot -m macppc /dev/rwd0c /usr/mdec/bootxx /usr/mdec/ofwboot
> >
> > This is asking me to provide "-B bno" which I am having difficulty
> > understanding what is required for this value.
>
> - On OF 2.x machines, sysinst (the NetBSD's installer program)
>   executes the installboot op so extra manual operation is not necessary.
>
> - The third arg of installboot(8) should be "secondary bootstrap path
>   from the target file system specified as the first arg", so
>   it should be (if your target root filesystem is mounted on "/"):
>
> # cp /usr/mdec/ofwboot /
> # installboot -m macppc /dev/rwd0c /usr/mdec/bootxx /ofwboot
>
>   or your /dev/wd0c partition (maybe equal to /dev/wd0a) doesn't
>   have a valid FFS.
>
> It would help to post whole kernel dmesg.
>
> Thanks,
> ---
> Izumi Tsutsui