Quik booting Wallstreets - a howto of sorts
First off, I've replied offlist to Ben Racher on this, but here's a
bit of a howto on getting quik booting working on a Wallstreet
powerbook with 2.6 initrd kernels (it probably works for other
oldworld powerbooks too and might be useful for other machines with
horribly busted firmware and ide drives)
What you will need:
- A MacOS boot CD, preferably 8.6 or better
- A network connection to a machine running an appletalk / appleshare
server
- A copy of BootX on the appletalk server
- A copy of System Disk on the appletalk server or an OSX 10.[0-2]
boot disk
- A recent debian boot CD (I used the 3.1r2 netinst CD) - it's
important that you are using a recent copy of quik as older ones foul
up with initrd kernels
First thing we'll do is entirely zap the machine. Power it off
completely, then do the "cmd-opt-p-r" tango on startup, letting at
least 3 chimes go through.
Next up, we'll install the Apple firmware patches. Either do the
first boot / reboot phase off the OSX install CD, or, preferably,
boot up off the MacOS CD, connect to the appleshare server and run
System Disk. If you're running system disk, also make the machine
stop at the open firmware prompt on boot.
If you did the patching through the OSX CD, you want to now make the
machine stop at open firmware on boot, which is, frankly, a pain.
Wallstreets are particularly picky about timings for the cmd-opt-o-f
keypress, so this will probably take you a few shots to get right,
the key thing seems to be hitting all the keys at the same time, and
doing so _during_ the startup chime. Fear not, it _can_ be done, and
eventually you'll be seeing open firmware's friendly[1] 0> prompt.
open the CD drive, stick your MacOS boot CD in, and type the following:
setenv auto-boot? false
reset-all
<wait for reboot back to OF>
bye
You now have a machine with patched firmware running MacOS off the
install CD. If you're not already connected to your appletalk
server, connect to it now.
The next step is crucial - although your firmware is patched, it
won't boot a drive that doesn't have a horde of tiny little Apple-
provided partitions on it (8 on my machine). So we will run the disk
utility off the install CD to reformat the drive. Obviously, if you
have important stuff on there, you want to back it up first. Don't
worry about how many partitions you create or whether they are hfs or
hfs+, you'll be blowing them away later anyway, the important thing
is that the Apple tool sems to be the only way of getting the chain
loader partitions onto the disk.
Next, we'll run BootX. If you don't already have the installation
kernel and initrd on the appleshare server, get them on there now.
Fire up BootX, set it to use the installation kernel and ramdisk and
add an additional kernel argument of "video=ofonly". Don't hit
"Linux" yet, though. With BootX still running, hard-eject the MacOS
CD (biro / paperclip on the drive's force eject tab) and swap in the
debian install CD. Now click on "Linux" and yo should (finally) see
the penguin logo and the standard boot messages
When you get to the "partitioning the disk" stage of the installer,
choose manual partitioning. Other choices will blow away the chain
loader partitions and you won't be able to boot with quik. Be
careful not to blow those partitions away yourself, either, they may
look pointless, but they are not. Your usable partitions will
probably start around partition 9. Also be aware that your boot
partition (whether it's a separate partition mounted onto /boot, or
the entire root partition) must be plain-jane EXT2, and must live in
the first 8GB of the drive. Remember what partition number your boot
partition is. As for the rest - knock yourself out :)
Ignore the warning about quik at the end of the install process. Let
it rip, and to hell with the consequences. If you have an
"unorthodox"setup, you may need to fire up a shell and manually run
quik before rebooting, but if you're that advanced you already know
this and what you have to do. If messing with the quik config file,
be aware that booting from quik with anyhing other than
"video=ofonly" seems to crash the kernel hard (more on this in
another post)
Reboot. Watch in awe as you machine drops to the open firmware
prompt and does - ummm - nothing.
There's a final bit of cleanup to be done before we can make this
work. The installer's quik setup knowns nothing of the firmware
patches, and also kills the proper boot command, so we need to tidy
that up. The '9' below should be replaced by the partition number of
your boot partition, as a hex number (thus partition 10 would be 'a')
setenv boot-device ide0/disk@0:9
setenv boot-command 1 bootr
reset-all
<wait for reboot back to OF>
boot
And you should now be into the second stage of installation of your
machine.
See? It's simple, really :)
Simon
[1] Yes, joke.
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