Re: partitioning & install help on late PowerBook

Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]> writes:
> at the end, I am a little confused about the many details, but I want to 
> install NetBSD on my PowerBook G4 Aluminium. It is a later model and has 
> openfirmware 4.

Pretty close to, if not the same as, the one I have.

> I verified that just a plain install using sysinst and "whole disk" will 
> result in an unbootable system

If you were able to get to sysinst then you already dodged a couple
of bullets ;-).  But at any rate, my notes say that before invoking
sysinst:

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... actually, first we gotta make partitions manually, per
https://www.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/partitioning.html#pdisk

Had to overwrite first few blocks with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/wd0c
before pdisk would work, but then "i" and create partitions:

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/wd0c'
 #:                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

then sysinst.  Tell it to use existing disklabel, but
explicitly adjust root partition to be newfs'd and mounted at /

Then install filesets.
-----

This leaves you in a state where there's a bootable NetBSD
system on the root partition, but you still need to get ofwboot.xcf
onto the boot partition, for which you need hfsutils as
I showed before.  And hfsutils isn't in the install image.

What I did, because I was running sysinst off an NFS-mounted image
instead of a CD, was just to install hfsutils in the NFS filesystem.
I'm not sure about other ways to bootstrap that, but I'm sure there
are some.

			regards, tom lane