Re: Install manual ? 5.3 Booting from floppies
On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 10:21:39AM +0200, Lars Nood?n wrote:
> First, what key sequence must one use to force a boot from floppy on
> an old-world macintosh? (and which of fn/ctrl/alt/"apple")
> correspond to "cmd" and "opt"
>
> Second, it would be really nice to have this information in the
> installation manual. It could fit in section 5.3 "Booting from
> floppies" since that is relevant nearly exclusively for old-world
> macintoshes.
You don't "force" an old-world mac to boot from floppy. If there
is a bootable floppy in the drive, it will use it unless you use
one of the tricks to force it to eject the floppy first. However,
this wouldn't help a Linux boot, since the ROM in those machines
only considers a MacOS floppy to be bootable. The only way to
boot Linux directly from a floppy is to tell open firmware to
use the floppy as your boot device. For example, if you have
the file vmlinux.coff on an HFS floppy, you can tell OF to
"boot fd:vmlinux.coff" and it will load that file and run it.
Of course, that assumes that you have some way to either run
OF commands directly, or change the settings, which is a pain
on some models if you don't want the MacOS installed.
The old-world models will by default only boot the MacOS, because
the default OF boot device is actually the Apple ROM, not a
drive. If you change the OF settings to boot from a device that
is a disk of some sort, it can either boot a disk block (quik)
or load a COFF object in a file from any filesystem it knows.
However, it's pretty limited in the number of supported filesystems.
The only one I found useful was HFS, but I think it could do ISO9660.
My 7600 is packed away, so I can't check.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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