Re: Setting the root partition for boot

[Matt Wallis <mattw%madmonks.org@localhost>]

Hi Uwe,

> On 11 Sep 2026, at 21:22, Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost> wrote:
> 
> Do you dual-boot, i.e. do you need to have apple partitioning?  Can
> you scrap the apple partion table and just use FAT, if your OFW
> supports it?

I’d like to keep it dual bootable, but I’m not hard committed to it. Have a G4 Cube and a Dual G5 if I really want to run some Mac things.

I’ll give the MBR option a try and see how I get on, I was also considering trying out a tftpboot server as I need to rebuild that for my Sparc IPX anyway.

One thing I’m not clear on here is how OpenFirmware and ofwboot interact, and maybe this is a read the source thing, but why is the command that I use in OF to load ofwboot, then specifying the kernel location per OF structures and not BSD structures?

i.e Why:
boot hd:,\ofwboot.xcf hd:5,/netbsd
And not
boot hd:.\ofwboot.xcf wd0b:/netbsd

? 

Shouldn’t we be passing NetBSD conventions to the boot loader, for it to hand to the kernel?

Matt.