Re: Building a macppc bootable USB image

On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 21:24:54 +0000, David Brownlee wrote:

> 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"

A few random followup notes...

On a G4 mini usb0 is the one on the right, next to the firewire.  The
one to the left, next to the DVI, is usb1.

You can look around with, e.g.

  0 > dev usb0  ok
  0 > ls
  ff9d7f00:  /hub@1
  ff9d8110:    /keyboard@1
   ok
  0 > dev usb1  ok
  0 > ls
  ff9d84d0:  /disk@1
   ok
  0 > dir usb1/disk:,\

  NetBSD 10.0 macppccd
       ...

There "ok" is the output from OFW tha, a bit confusingly, it prints in
the same line as your input is if there were no output, i.e. what you
type is "dev usb0", "ls", etc (random fun fact - "dev" used to be
called "cd" in earlier versions of Sun's OpenBoot, but it was renamed
b/c "cd" is a valid hex number).

The thing I hate about the install cd is that for some reason we
explicitly *hide* the kernels.  See distrib/cdrom/hide-hfs.lst - so
the kernel names are not in that "dir" output and you have to remember
that it's called "netbsd.macppc", which I usually never do.

I think the USB flash should be already plugged in when the mac is
booted, if you've got to the OFW prompt before inserting the USB flash
you will probably need to "reset-all" (may be there's a less drastic
way to make it rescan USB, but I'm not very familiar with Apple's
OFW).

-uwe