Re: Building a macppc bootable USB image

On Sun, 21 Jan 2024 at 12:49, Valery Ushakov <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jan 21, 2024 at 07:40:55 +0100, Martin Husemann wrote:
>
> > > For entertainment value I tried creating a standard MBR type 12 msdos
> > > partition on a USB stick, and copying ofwboot.xcf and a kernel onto it
> > > but it also did not boot (I didn't expect it to be that simple :)
> >
> > I would expect that to work but needing a more complex boot command
> > specifying partition numbers.  Can you show the boot command you
> > tried and the fdisk output for the stick you created?
>
> It doesn't need them for booting off of an MBR-only hdd.  My mini has
> boot-device set to hd:,\ofwboot.elf where hd is the usual alias for
> the primary disk, and that disk is MBR-only with a FAT32 (11, boot)
> and a NetBSD (169) partitions.
>
> But then apple's ofw is effed up in unique artisanal ways every step
> of the way, so nothing would really surprise me :)

While every model may be its own unique handcrafted slice of
unexpected boot behaviour, we should be able to have a simple path
that works for many of them, and is easy to document and follow :)

Could I ask as to a little more detail on your booting setup? - what
was the PowerMacX,Y model, was the FAT32 partition 0, did it just hold
ofwboot.xcf, was it active etc?

(Unless I could persuade you to update some NetBSD docs directly? :-p

Thanks

David