Re: boot partition (Was: install on PowerBook - no root partition defined)

Valery Ushakov <[email protected]> writes:
> On Wed, Oct 04, 2023 at 11:39:44 +0200, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
>> Not related with this issue, but to the bootloader in general: do I
>> need to have a small HFS or FAT partition to hold ofwboot.xcf in the
>> final setup?  Rethinking, I probably do.  It is not that well
>> explained in the documentation, but can be inferred.

> You need some partition that OFW groks where you can put ofwboot.

Right.  I've had success on a 2001 Cube as well as a 2004 aluminum
PowerBook using more or less the recipe at

https://www.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/partitioning.html#pdisk

That ends with no partition map at all that fdisk understands,
but pdisk shows

$ sudo pdisk /dev/rwd0
Edit /dev/rwd0 -
Command (? for help): p

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/rwd0'
 #:                type name      length   base      ( size )
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple         63 @ 1        
 2:           Apple_HFS boot       20480 @ 64        ( 10.0M)
 3:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap     1048576 @ 20544     (512.0M) S1  SFS k0  (swap)
 4:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 root   116141120 @ 1069120   ( 55.4G) S0 RUFS k0  /

Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=117210240 (55.9G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

Command (? for help): q

Then you have to install ofwboot.xcf into the HFS partition using
hfsutils, and finally you tell Open Firmware to auto-boot from
there:

0 > setenv boot-device hd:2,ofwboot.xcf
0 > setenv boot-file hd:4,/netbsd
0 > setenv boot-command key? invert if boot then
0 > setenv auto-boot? true
0 > reset-all                         # to store values


In my case, both machines' CD drives gave up the ghost awhile ago,
and the boot ROMs are too old to have a clue about booting off USB,
so I had to set up a bootp/NFS server on another machine and
netboot from that to perform the installation.

			regards, tom lane