Re: Building a macppc bootable USB image

On Thu, 18 Jan 2024 at 17:41, Adam Russell <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> This blog post outlines what I did to create a bootable USB drive for my G4 Sawtooth powermacs.
>
> http://www.rabbitfarm.com/cgi-bin/blosxom/netbsd

Thanks Adam - this was extremely helpful!

I've confirmed that 9.3 and 10.0_RC3 (*) installer ISO images dd'd to
a USB key boot on my G4 iMac with  "boot usb0/disk:,\ofwboot.xcf"

*) The 10.0_RC3 kernel has an issue with the display, so fails part
way through the autoconf dmesg, but that is a separate issue :)

OK, I think there are a number of possible action items:


1) Official NetBSD docs on writing ISO images to USB keys & booting
the installer

As I've most recently made noise on this I'm happy to shamelessly
steal from Adam's blog post to try to update things (unless anyone
else wants to take a pass)

That will likely include updating the NetBSD/macppc install notes &
NetBSD/macppc webpages:
- Writing ISO images to USB keys
- How to access the iso9660 filesystem if the USB key is connected to
a running macpcc system
- Improve the notes on finding the correct usb & disk device from which to boot
Then a call out to the list and elsewhere to ask for people to test
the notes on booting a NetBSD/macppc installer


2) Improving the install procedure (and notes on same)

Currently the notes discuss various approaches to setting up a disk
for install, pretty much all of which involve external tools.
OpenBSD/macppc can boot from an MBR partitioned disk, with an initial
FAT partition. That is something that should be relatively easy to
integrate into an automated install - if anyone is interested?
Alternatively (or as well), we need people willing to try the various
methods for installing NetBSD/macppc and reporting issues and updating
notes


3) Live image

It should also be possible to build an MBR formatted image with a boot
FAT32 partition and an ffs main partition which can be written to a
USB key and booted. This could be configured as an installer, or live
image. The latter could also be written directly to a mac disk to
provide an "instant install" (bar the IO time :) option, complete with
resize_ffs to take advantage of the extra space.


All in all some interesting options for anyone with a little time and
an interest in fiddling or updating docs...

Umberto - you mentioned you might be interested in some aspect of
this? Let me know whatever you find of interest and I'll pick a
different area to not overlap :)

David