Re: PowerPC cd status
On Tue, Mar 21, 2000 at 05:31:08PM -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> So, with a tremendous effort from Ethan Benson, I now understand how to make
> new-world bootable CDs. A conversation with Ben told me my problem with
> floppy-booting on oldworld, so that should be fixed soon also. At that
> point I am looking at (with luck) having the first CD be new-world bootable
> and also PReP (hopefully adding an HFS partition table will not muck up the
> prep booter and vice versa. I have high hopes.). It will include floppy
Back when I was making PReP boot CD's with a perl script, Troy Benjegerdes
was already making the changes to mkhybrid to handle PReP boot. I
submitted his changes to the mkhybrid maintainer and recall him commenting
that HFS/PReP hybrid boot CD's worked fine. I have high hopes too. :)
The HFS partition isn't at block 0 on the media is it? That's where the
PReP header (which is merely a PC partition table) sits. PReP firmware
reads the first two 512 byte blocks on the media, looks up an entry in
that header which contains an absolute offset to the start of an image,
and then reads it in and vectors to it.
> All of that is still theoretical right now, however.
> What I can say for sure is:
>
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 dan Debian 756228096 Mar 21 17:26 potato-powerpc-1.raw
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 dan Debian 680079360 Mar 21 17:27 potato-powerpc-2.raw
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 dan Debian 162017280 Mar 21 17:28 potato-powerpc-3.raw
>
> Obviously I need to cut the size limits a little lower, but otherwise, we're
> making real progress here :)
I can confirm that some of my old bootable PReP CD builds really did work
save for the insanity of all the broken packages and broken task selection
in boot-floppies 3-4 months. There is some guy running around the Phoenix
LUG with a Motorola Powerstack (PReP) that was installed from a pre-alpha
potato/PowerPC CD. :)
--
Matt Porter
porter@debian.org
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