Re: Netbooting a blue and white G3

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

FWIW - I've had the best experiences with OF 3.x machines - G3 B&W and G4.

It's the OF 1 & 2 machines that have given me fits.

On the other hand, I've never managed to get a netboot to work.  I've
always used CD or floppy.  (or the format-the-disk-in-another-machine-and-swap
technique.   Eeeeeewwwwww!)

YMMV. ;->

-dgl-


>On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 10:55 AM, Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost> 
>wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> That can be a challenge, many macs, especially pre-G4 models, are very
>> finicky about that. Some combinations will only work with cable select, some
>> only with master / slave set, some disks don't like each other - it took me
>> a while to get my beige G3 to boot with two disks on the 1st IDE channel.
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> I meant pdisk - OSX and OF don't see the NetBSD disklabel.
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> In part you can thank Apple for that - each OF version has its own set of
>> bugs and weirdnesses, the ones used in PMac G3 models are by far the worst
>
>Flavio and Michael, thanks for the info. This is good. I have a
>feeling my machine is going to give me a few problems trying to use 2
>disks on the same controller, but I'll try that again later.
>
>I'm really focused on trying to get the thing to be able to boot from
>the hard drive by only using stuff available from the install CD.
>
>The stuff that Uwe said earlier (which I remember from a long time
>ago) makes it seem like it should be possible, after all, all they are
>doing is putting an iso filesystem on the front of the disk and then
>loading the bootloader from there. If OpenBSD can create an MSDOS
>filesystem at the front of the disk and load a bootloader from it, and
>then have it load the kernel from the / disk, we should be able to do
>it too. Also, they are using the mkisofs command, and I think this has
>been gone for a while and I don't remember which tool replaced it,
>maybe makefs?
>
>I've been trying various stuff and the firmware seems to be very picky
>about it so far, but I'm not done yet. I'm probably missing something
>really simple between fdisk and disklabel when at the # prompt in the
>installer CD. So far I'm not able to get disklabel to label the disk
>after I do fdisk to create the MSDOS partition (id 6) and the NetBSD
>partition (id 169). It complains about some stuff.
>
>More later.
>
>Andy