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

[Izumi Tsutsui <tsutsui%ceres.dti.ne.jp@localhost>]

> This worked, until I hit the next problem. NetBSD installed, and I can
> use this command to boot a kernel, but it won't complete the boot:
> 
> boot ultra1:,ofwboot.xcf

How does it fail?
Is ofwboot.xcf is loaded or not?
Or fails to load a kernel?
Exact logs (as I posted) might help.

Are you also sure "ultra1" is a proper alias for your wd1 disk?
It looks device aliases are quite OF version dependent.
You can check it by output of "devalias" command on OF prompt
and wd1 attach messages in dmesg of NetBSD since both of them
include info about bus and address for the device.

> I thought I tried "zeroing" the front of the disk before when I was
> manually using fdisk and disklabel but it didn't work (I still got the
> same error from disklabel about incorrect magic number). Did you fix
> disklablel or fdisk as well?

No, the image contains stock binaries derived from 5.0.1 sources.

> Or maybe I was using the wrong FAT type
> for my machine?

Well, you might not be wrong, but Apple's OF implementation is. ;-p

OF looks confused and gets weird results by various settings.
According to my expericense, it depends on:
(1) MBR partition types (FAT12/FAT16S/FAT16B)
(2) MSDOSFS format (FAT12/FAT16)
(3) MSDOSFS size
(4) location of ofwboot.xcf in MSDOSFS

On Apus2000 OF2, (1) and (2) must be same, at least on 8MB partition.
Otherwise ofwboot.xcf is loaded but fails right after it starts.

On G4 OF3, it fails to load ofwboot.xcf if
- (1) is FAT16B and (2) is FAT16
- (1) is FAT12, (2) is FAT16, and ofwboot.xcf is copied on GENERIC kernel
It works if
- (1) is FAT12 and (2) is FAT12
- (1) is FAT12, (2) is FAT16, and ofwboot.xcf is copied on INSTALL kernel
  (probaby because of (4), at least on 8MB MSDOS partition)

Maybe it's safe to use 1MB FAT12 MSDOS partition with MBR_PTYPE_FAT12
though OpenBSD use 1MB FAT12 MSDOS partition with MBR_PTYPE_FAT16B.

> Is there a way to change the "config" of the kernel to point to a
> different boot device without re-compiling?

Unfortunately, no. To specify root device, it requires
hardcoded strings (lile "wd1a") so we can't patch compiled a binary.

---
Izumi Tsutsui