Re: The first reboot to hard drive after the CD-rom install failed

[Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello,

On Wed, 1 Apr 2020 12:49:14 +0200
Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 08:16:28PM -0400, Michael wrote:
> > Ouch. We really need to teach the installer to create a small HFS
> > partition with just the loader in it. On machines with OpenFirmware
> > before 3 we can put a loader in the first sector of the disk which then
> > loads the rest of the loader from a NetBSD partition - that's what
> > installboot does, and likely did on your machine.  
> 
> The partition is not a (big) problem (see uncommited changes I mentioned
> above), but putting HFS into it is non trivial, unless we can provide
> the HFS content as a binary blob and just dd it in place.
> 
> We have no write support in our hfs file system, nor in makefs.

IIRC all Apple OF versions understand iso9660. On my Pismo ( my only
OF3 Mac without OSX installed ) I created an iso9660 filesystem with
just ofwboot.xcf in it, dd-ed it into the first sectors of the
harddisk, then ran disklabel to create netbsd partitions, with a
healthy distance so they wouldn't mess with the ISO fs. With that OF
sees the ISO fs, loads ofwboot.xcf which in turn finds the disklabel
etc.
I'm not sure where exactly we keep the disklabel on macppc without an
apple partition map, it may jut be an accident that the ISO fs still
works.

have fun
Michael