Re: How do I use those PowerMac images-1.44?

["John R. MacPhail" <jrmacpha@math.uwaterloo.ca>]

Have you tried BootX?  Try pointing BootX at ramdisk.image.gz (as a
RAM disk image, no decompression needed).  If that runs, then you are
rolling.

If BootX really will not work on your machine, then you may be a
candiate for yaboot, about which I know nothing.

Now, about those floppy images.  Get boot-floppy-hfs.img in binary
mode.  Be sure to lock the downloaded file (in the Finder) before
letting DiskCopy touch it.  Then use DiskCopy to make a floppy from
it.  That floppy should boot on your machine, but it will probably be
useless, because the video mode will be wrong.  In this list, go back
a couple of weeks ago to where Dan explained to me about using ResEdit
to fix that.  You ought to be able to get ResEdit and fiddle with the
video mode.  With that resolved, the floppy will boot.  Great!  Now it
demands the _next_ floppy, which should be got by making a bitwise
copy of root.bin -- and there must be MacOS tools to do that, but I
don't know what.  You _can_ make it from an installed Debian system by
using `dd' as in the docs.  It may take several attempts.  With that
floppy made, and inserted when asked for, you are off to the races.

As I mentioned above, you should hope to avoid all this floppy stuff.
But it does need clearer explanation.  Here are two questions I still
have:

  1.  I was able to boot with floppies made from boot-floppy-hfs.img
and root.bin, but never made any sense out of rescue.bin -- does it
work for anybody?  What is it supposed to do?

  2.  Once we are in ResEdit, modifying the arguments being sent to
the Linux kernel on boot-floppy-hfs.img, what is the procedure for
specifying that root.bin can be found on some hard disk partition
instead of in the floppy drive?

---
John