Re: Troubleshooting netboot on a PowerMac G4 Cube

Success!  For anyone following along at home:

I wrote:
> (1) If I follow the macppc INSTALL doc's advice and do manual
> partitioning and newfs, then tell sysinst to "Re-install",
> it fails with "No root partition defined. Cannot continue".

> (2) If I ignore that advice and try a normal install, using
> the existing partitions I already created, it fails while
> invoking disklabel with "openpty() failed".  (I also get the
> openpty complaint from some other operations, such as trying
> to configure the network.)

The reason for (2) is that Martin's recipe missed out "./MAKEDEV opty".
Apparently the "all" set doesn't include any ptyNN devices, and
at least in the minimal environment we have here, they're needed.

As for (1), the INSTALL document's advice for OF3 machines is
definitely buggy or out-of-date.  The process that worked for me
was

1. Partition disk manually with pdisk, per INSTALL directions.
2. Use newfs to create filesystem(s).
3. Follow INSTALL's recipe about mounting said filesystems
   and creating /etc/fstab (I'm not sure that the latter step
   is actually necessary; sysinst overwrote fstab later).
4. run sysinst (btw, this complains unless you've set TERM).
5. Choose "Install", not "Re-install" as INSTALL claims.
6. Choose "Use existing disklabel".
7. The mount points for the FFS filesystems will appear as /mnt,
   fix them manually.  (It appears that this is left over from
   step 3.  But you can't skip step 3, or sysinst will not have
   any mount points chosen at all, and YOU CAN'T CHANGE THAT.
   Step 3 is clearly working around a sysinst bug here.)
8. Continue through normal install process.
9. Exit from sysinst, reboot.

(At this point I'm still loading ofwboot.xcf from bootp/tftp,
but I can load the kernel off the machine's disk.  I need to
get hfstools installed and then I can try to put ofwboot.xcf
on the HFS partition I made.)

It appears that a HEAD kernel with 9.3 userland works with
no problems worse than pkgin bleating about possible version
mismatches.  You can't use sysinst from HEAD though; it's
expecting a different list of filesets than 9.3 has.

Thanks for the help!

			regards, tom lane