Re: The first reboot to hard drive after the CD-rom install failed

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 23:37:05 +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 10:21:55PM +0100, Sevan Janiyan wrote:
> 
> > On 31/03/2020 21:55, Martin Husemann wrote:
> > > MBR on macppc?
> > 
> > Yes, it's supported by OpenFirmware. I have a clamshell iBook G3 which
> > is setup this way.
> 
> I know OF supports it, but AFAICT it has never been part of our installation
> procedure (and there are no traces in -current or older sysinst sources
> of it). So what am I missing? [Serious question - I have been trying to
> improve sysinst for macppc and mac68k (have some uncommited parts), but
> I obviously miss some parts of the big picture or some things don't work
> as they are supposed to that make this quite hard and fail empirical
> testing - so any hints welcome]
> 
> Isn't the bootloader going into a special APM part and supposed to do all
> magic by itself?

At least on more modern macs you can set up your disk with MBR only.
Here's how my test mini g4 is set up:

  https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/2017/04/12/msg002313.html

Then you can mount that FAT partition that contains ofwboot* r/w under
NetBSD.  That was *extremely* convenient when I was trying to debug
ofwboot allocation problems (ofwboot .xcf vs .elf), as you can just cp
new ofwboot into the boot partition.  As far as I can tell it's very
important that there's no apple partition map on that disk.

My main mini (and before it my b&w g3) were set up with the ISO image
trick:

  http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/2002/09/19/0001.html

That works, but if you want a newer ofwboot you need to make the new
image and carefully write it to the disk with the right dd skip= seek=
incantation.

-uwe