Local boot on OFW 2.4 Beige G3?

[Donald Lee <MacPPC2%caution.icompute.com@localhost>]

Good morning,

It is time for me to retire one of my machines, and I am trying to
upgrade it from a 68K mac to a Beige G3/OFW 2.4.  I'm not having much luck.
I'm using the 4.0.1 release, the .iso from the ftp site, and floppy images
and docs from same.

I have gone over the install docs much more carefully this time around, and
have to comment on the improvements in the documentation, esp, in the
OFW handling in the docs.  Nice work, guys!

I'm also impressed with the improvements in the installer and the boot CD.
One of the things I tried was to put the disk I want to use in an OFW 3
machine.  Booting from the CD, installing to disk, and booting from that
disk is chid's play.  Cool.

OK.  That said, OFW 2.4 is a pain.

I have tried several approaches.  The one I have not tried is netboot.
Netboot for various reasons is off the table for me.  If I can't boot
locally, this machine is not very useful.

I have tried the floppy - it gives me the little rotating cursor briefly,
but always fails.  (I tried quite a few times)

I have tried booting the CD - quite a few tries and quite a few variations
on OFW commands and settings.  From the docs, it sounds like it simply
doesn't work.

I have tried installing to the IDE disk on an OFW machine, and then putting
that disk in the Beige, but when I do that, it won't boot.  (more below)

--Has anyone actually had any success in booting an OFW 2.4 machine with
anything other than netboot?  If the answer is no, then maybe I should
not be beating my head against this particular wall.


Two particular scenarios of note about prepping a disk on the OFW 3 machine for
use in the OFW 2.4 machine.

I tried two partitioning schemes.  The first was to let the installer partition
the disk.  I figured that this would give me my best shot at success, but
the disk that resulted appears to be "poison" to the Beige G3.  When I
connect the disk formatted this way to the Beige, it will not boot
from any device - not CD, not floppy (MacOS 9/X, not NetBSD).  I presume
that this is a problem because the MacOS ROM is looking for "drivers"
on the NetBSD disk, finding "something", loading it and causing some
sort of ugly carnage.  I *can* get to OFW with this setup, and I tried
several variations of boot commands, but the errors I get from OFW seem
to say that there is no suitable HFS partition to boot from.  (yup.  There is
no HFS partition at all....)

Second variation of "prep on OFW3 and then boot in Beige" was to use
Disk Utility from Mac OS X 10.2 to give me my partitions, and then use
the NetBSD installer to change the names/types/mount points to appropriate
stuff.  Use the HFS partition to hold ofwboot.xcf.  This seems to come
closer, as the complaints from OFW are a little less emphatic, but
still does not seem to work.


My next attempt will be to do what I have done successfully in the past -
replace the ROM stick in the box with an OFW 2.0.x ROM, and install and
run it that way.  My recollection is that when I did this many moons ago,
I used the OFW 2.0 ROM to get a SCSI disk installed using a NetBSD boot
floppy, and then could boot from the SCSI disk.  I don't remember if I
ever got it booting with the OFW 2.4 ROMs.

Anyone actually done a local boot with OFW 2.4 ROMs?

-dgl-