Re: Installing and booting and OF3 machine from a single empty internaldisk, not working

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Izumi Tsutsui 
<tsutsui%ceres.dti.ne.jp@localhost> wrote:
> I've created a test install CD ISO image based on netbsd-5-0 branch:
> ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/tsutsui/iso/macppccd-5.0.1_PATCH-OF3test.iso.gz
> ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/tsutsui/iso/macppc-OF3test-20091125.diff
>
> Note:
> - this is not well-tested and could coruppt your disks
>  (i.e. use it at your own risk)
> - this won't work on OF2 machines
>  (no version check and no usr/mdec/ofwboot due to ramdisk overflow)
> - not sure what happens if your disk has HFS with Apple partition map
>
> - see NetBSD guide for general sysinst info
>  http://www.NetBSD.org/docs/guide/en/chap-exinst.html
> - on MBR partitions menu, select "b: Use the entire disk"
> - on Disklabel partitions menu, select
>  "a: Set sizes of NetBSD partitions"
>  and change partition or swap size if necessary
> - MSDOSFS boot partition is prepared automatically, but
>  don't change it in the disklabel editor
> - to boot from disk, command like "boot ultra0:,ofwboot.xcf" should work
>  (check "devalias" on OF and use an appropriate device for your disk)
>
> Please let me know how it goes on you OF3 machines.

I finally found time to try this.

I downloaded your disk, and tried it.

The disklabel part fails the same as if I try to prepare the disk manually:

disklabel: ioctl DIOCWDINFO: Label magic number or checksum is wrong!
(disklabel or kernel is out of date?)

This apparently comes out of:
src/sbin/disklabel/main.c

Because of this:

int
writelabel(int f, struct disklabel *lp)
{
        if (lp != &lab)
                lab = *lp;
        return write_label(f);
}

static void
l_perror(const char *s)
{

        switch (errno) {

        case ESRCH:
                warnx("%s: No disk label on disk;\n"
                    "use \"disklabel -I\" to install initial label", s);
                break;

        case EINVAL:
                warnx("%s: Label magic number or checksum is wrong!\n"
                    "(disklabel or kernel is out of date?)", s);
                break;

No idea why this is a problem. I haven't tried playing with my G4
machine yet, I still need to figure out why I can't netboot it. Maybe
I will do that today. But the G4 machine is next. It's an eMac though,
so it's hard to add another disk. I don't know if I can boot from a
USB disk.

Any help with this disklabel problem would be great.

Thanks!

Andy