Re: Installing openbsd on emac without disk drive?

Hi Lucas,

On September 26, 2018 2:46:43 AM PDT, Lucas <[email protected]> wrote:
>I recently got my hands on a 1.42GHZ Emac with a faulty disk drive, is
>it possible to use a usb or firewire external disk drive to install
>OpenBSD and if not is there another way to install OpenBSD on my Emac?
>
>Thanks.

If I remember right, USB worked fine on my eMac.  It's apparently hit or miss, but if you have a newer eMac (I think the 1.42GHz counts as "newer" here) you should be fine.  I don't remember needing to do anything *too* fancy on the OFW prompt, though (just a matter of finding the device; http://www.mediacaster.nl/usb_boot_imac_powerpc_g5.html is a good set of instructions, though you'll obviously need to boot bsd.rd instead of BootX ;) ).

FireWire should work without issue; I don't know how well OpenBSD *specifically* works with it (I don't have any FireWire drives on hand to test), but Macs themselves specifically support(ed) it (Firewire is to pre-Thunderbolt Macs as USB is to Wintel PCs in terms of native platform support / integration).

On that note, if you have another PC (e.g. another Mac) with a working FireWire port, it should be possible to put the eMac in Target Disk Mode, plug it into your other PC, and copy bsd.rd + the install files to your eMac (and boot bsd.rd via the OFW prompt).  This will work regardless of whether or not the eMac still has OS X installed at all, let alone in working condition.

Best of luck!
-- 
Ryan S. Northrup (RyNo)
[email protected]