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Re: Netbooting a blue and white G3

Andy,
Check if you have a Rev. A or B logic board (mobo). I can't check right now, but you can look up lowendmac.com's profiles, where there's a procedure to check which one you have.
You'll be all right if you have the Rev. B logic board, because it supports two drives on each of the two ATA channels. If you have a Rev. A, you can only have one drive in ata0 (is it really ata0?).
Whichever is your logic board's revision, be sure to always configure the drives as master and slave, accordingly. Never ever use the "cable select" option. Also, it's a good thing to respect the ATA cable position (master on the end of the cable, slave on the middle connector).
I am not sure if OF3 can load ofwboot.xcf from a MSDOS partition. I use a very small HFS partition for the bootloader, cause I boot from a 128MB CompactFlash card. If you already have a Mac OS X installation, just place ofwboot on its partition and be sure it's inside the first 128GB of the disk. Otherwise, just create a small HFS partition for the bootloader.
As you certainly know, you can have the bootloader placed on a different disk than you NetBSD partitions. So, if you don;t want to have the HFS partition in your NetBSD disk, just slap another drive in the machine. 


Cheers,
Flavio

On 15/10/2009, at 09:57, Andy Ruhl wrote:


On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 7:46 PM, Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

The easiest way is:
- - put ofwboot.xcf into your OSX boot partition, that way you don't have to mess with a FAT or whatever fs ( I seem to remember you mentioned having OSX 
on that machine )
- - create the NetBSD partitions with OSX. No need to format them with anything, just create them and write down the partition number for what you intend to become your root ( /dev/disk1sx where x is the number you want ) - - netboot into NetBSD, change the partition types to UNIX or whatever, doesn't really matter what as long as it keeps OSX from attempting to mount them, put a matching disklabel in place ( should be more or less automatic 
), newfs, unpack, etc.
- - boot hd:ofwboot.xcf ultra1:x/netbsd with x being the number you wrote down above, and ultra1 being the devalias for your NetBSD disk. On my beige G3 it would be ide1, on my G4 it's ultra1, the iBook uses hd1 IIRC - no idea what it would be on a b&w G3, just look at your devaliases. But hd should 
point at the first OF readable partition on the first disk on any OF3
machine.


Ok, this is nice for people who want to keep OSX.

For my purposes, I can add a new disk to the machine (200 gig IDE),
but when I do it the thing no longer boots. I get the folder with a
question mark. I need to make sure I'm putting the slave disk in there
correctly though. If I can fix that problem, then this method seems
like a good idea.

Question: You said "Create the NetBSD partitions with OSX..." then
"Change the partition types to UNIX whatever..." Is this done with
disklabel or pdisk? I'm hoping I can just figure this out myself.

So with this, this would be a second FAQ entry something like:

How can I create a bootable NetBSD environment on my OF3 machine while
still keeping OSX as the default OS?

Or even better, just have a separate section for OF3 machines.

I have to apologize, I haven't gone back and read every post to know
if this has already been discussed or if these docs already exist...

The current FAQ and docs are very much geared toward muddling through
whatever errors are encountered, rather than just breaking the process
into separate docs for whatever OF or machine type you have.

I have booted NetBSD on a whole lot of different machine types, so far
this has been the most difficult one that I can remember that is
claimed to be supported. It doesn't seem like it needs to be.

Thanks for the help everyone, I'll see what I can do from here.

Andy
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