Re: new potato boot-floppies

[Tovar <tvr@usermail.com>]

    For people who care about powerpc stuff....

    While the changelog below mentions powerpc, these are of course only
    ia32 floppies.  Having no patience, I have taken the liberty to
    build a boot floppy for oldworld apple powermacs that solves the
    dreaded no response from keyboard when prompting to insert root
    floppy problem.  It seems to work for doing installs on the one
    machine that I was able to test it on, an Apple 7200/75.  It may
    spew out a few error messages at one or two places about missing
    symbols, can't load modules.  This should be ignored, unless someone
    discovers a piece of hardware that isn't supported during the
    install phase, in which case I'll fix it.  It should be fine,
    though.  This works for the 2.2r2 Debian release for powerpc
    oldworld macs ONLY!  It has not been tested on any other hardware. 
    I'm not sure there IS any other hardware where it could be used. 
    This should hold eager Debian users for powerpc until dummy-console
    gets fixed for the new input layer.  Note that this link used to
    point to a 2.2.17 based floppy I built a while ago that really
    wasn't all that useful.

    http://www.netfall.com/powerpc

    Download the file boot-floppy-oldworld.img

Thank you VERY MUCH for generating this!  I can confirm that it works on a
9500 with XLR8 G3 upgrade.  It does not work well however, with the ix3D
(IMS) video card, even if it's set to 1024x768x8 (which at least makes it
vaguely readable).  Fortunately, there was patch space.  For those who don't
know, this boot disk is an HFS floppy with a custom 'System' file, a token
'Finder' and gzip'ed kernel, saved as 'zImage'.  The fix is to mount the
floppy under LINUX and, in my case, edit the resource fork:

        /floppy/.resource/System

in 'binary-overwrite-mode'.  Search for the string 'adb' and in the blank
space following that, add 'video=ofonly', giving:

    root=0200 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1 adb_buttons=103,111 video=ofonly

That should work for display cards that LINUX doesn't handle well and 
hopefully on those which it works properly on.  You might consider making 
that change in the public version.  (Thank you to whoever left plenty of 
room for patching there!)

One can replace the 'zImage' with one's own kernel (if it fits) and have a
Rescue Disk for machines whose hardware the default kernel does not handle.

However, this clearly shows that the earlier problem was fixed in the kernel
as when i did this, its old behavior of not recognizing <return> when asking
for a 'root disk' came back.  The supplied kernel appears to be of '2.4'
vintage, so it should work for awhile with the newer releases.

Again, i really appreciate this, as it allowed me to hack things so i can
select different systems when the OldWorld machine is booted.  I did this
by creating a 1.4M HFS partition (which i stole from my 'Swap' partition,
since i've got LOTS of memory) and copying the floppy into that partition.
I then copied in my custom kernel and patched my boot args (as above) with:

    ... root=/dev/sda7 prompt_ramdisk=0 ...

Now, i can boot into LINUX by holding down

    <Command><Option><Shift> E 2

(all at the same time) just after hearing the reboot sound.  Unlike the 
BootX approach, i can do that without a monitor attached by keeping those 
keys held down for about 15-20 sec. (your time may vary according to disk 
and CPU speeds).  Here's a reference for various boot-up options:

    http://internet.ggu.edu/university_library/keyboard.html

Note well that i suspect the keyboard hack may not work everywhere.  My
recollection, from years ago, is that it is in the commonly-used HDT
(Hard Disk Toolkit) SCSI driver and not in the Apple software.

Whether or not it's considered a 'duplication of effort', i have especially
appreciated the work.  Even if so, it will still be very useful to those
who are not ready to upgrade beyond 'Potato'.  I suspect even when the
'busybox' is replaced, this booting mechanism may still prove useful on 
the 'OldWorld' machines as it doesn't required a general awareness of 
dealing low level software (e.g. Open Firmware), and on some 'OldWorld'
machines, this can also require two computers, an obscure serial cable,
and suitable software to access the serial port at the right speed (which
also handles the Open Firmware escape sequences adequately).  This is 
 not  something i would want 'newbies' to have to deal with...

Thanks again!
                           -- Tovar  (On the 'Net for over 25 years)