Help!! boot without BootX? Beige G3 Rev. 1 Open Firmware SUCKS!
Okay guys, Fun times over here. I've already been in contact with a few people on here, but I don't think
my setup and situation were clearly explained. I've got MacOS 9 with it's standard partition setup, the actual "Blessed" system is on hda7. While I was installing, I created a 50 meg hfs partition (hda8) that I planed on using after getting everything installed. I tried to get woody installed on here, because I was only able to boot this thing into Linux with the old HFS-BOOT floppy, but for some reason it wouldn't install after it booted (couldn't find packages). So anyway, I think it really sucks that there are no HFS-BOOT disks for etch, ALL the images in the powerpc floppy section are absolutely worthless, mac spit out every damn one of them. I have patched open firmware, and have a bunch of this retarded "fourth" code added into my nvramrc and I have use nvramrc set to true, but of course, what boots for everyone elses OpenFirmware refuses to work for me. I FINALLY found the CORRECT boot-device code to use
ide0/disk@0,0:<partitionumber> but now I have no clue what to do from here, there are no instructions to do what I am trying to do. I've tried to install quik, using everything found at
penguinppc.org, even the "Quik for mac" but it's a worthless piece of garbage also. In linux, quikconfig wants to create itself on partition 3 of hda9... uh, that makes no friggin sense to me, hda9 is my linux part, if anything I want it installed on hda8 (The 50 meg hfs "boot" partition) The documentation (or lack of) for quik is hilarious at best. So I tried Quik for mac, and of course, it asks me where my root is, where my swap is, where my /usr partition is (I don't have a /usr partition, my /usr is on hda9) and then it says "Invalid file system or not clean" or something stupid like that... but it IS ext2 as the inadequate documentation says it should be, and on boot, my kernal says she's clean... OUTSTANDING!!! WAY TO GO!!! Quik for Mac totally detects everything correctly (Where my root and swap is, and the drives correct size... Sigh, absolutely nothing wants to work on this damn thing, and I can't figure out anyone who knows enough about this exact, particularly buggy machine... I ended up with a Ubuntu installation on here, for the simple reason of Ubuntu's install being able to recognize an HFS partition without having to do pivot_root (which on debian, would refuse to pivot back to / and of course everyone is like "Oh it just works" well not for me thanks... Grrr, so damn frustrating. I have gotten maybe 5 hours sleep this week because of this stupid machine... Sorry for the bad attitude and paraphrasing but this thing has me on the brink of insanity. It seems like a very simple thing to do, create a file on the damn 50 meg partition, that open firmware can boot and then hand off to my /boot/ kernal... For a brief moment, I thought the NetBSD manual was going to tell me how to do that using ofwboot... but no, they decided to talk about how to plug a damn serial terminal into this thing (something i've never needed to do on this thing, only part of my Openfirmware that seems stable...) and then it just says "Yeah, you can boot ofwboot off of these filesystems..." and then don't mention anything at all about how exactly to do it, it just says you can... Well that's fantastic. Please don't send me any links to manuals or forums or posts, I've looked through OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu and Google for every combination of keywords about this, and now everything I search for is pages of crap I've already looked at. So yeah, I'm sure it's something simple and I'll be laughed at for being so retarded, and if that's the case, well I'm just glad someone got a laugh out of this ordeal. I'm not a Mac expert at all, never touched one in my life before this, and now I feel all dirty and abused. I am trying to get back into linux, and my "skills" are horrendously rusty and outdated at best. Thanks for any help guys! This one has definitely got my brain ready to implode. If anyone knows a wild eyed canadian linux user turned farmer named Paul Anderson let me know, I'm sure he'd love to help me out... LOL. I'm not opposed to reinstalling linux on this thing, debian distro this time, but I need to get a working boot floppy, (yes, I wrote them correctly, using 3 different floppy image writers, including rawritewin or whatever its called) and I'd need to know how to boot into linux without using MacOS and BootX (My current way of getting into ubuntu), so it seems like since I have a working linux install, and an empty boot partition (hda8) I should test that openfirmware can boot me before I go thru installing linux on this thing for the 50th time. Thanks guys, I really appreciate any help I can get. Take care.
Revision 1 Beige G3, 266, Open Firmware Verson 2.01f (Supposedly patched with System disk 2.3.1, still reports as 2.01f, but nvramrc full of new crap)
192 meg ram,
4 gig IDE HD,
24x IDE CDROM
MacOS 9, residing on hda7, standerd retarded apple bootstrap partition setup using hda1-6
50 meg HFS blank partition on hda8
Ubuntu 6.10 installed using netinst kernal and initrd thru BootX using Ext2 root on hda9, swap on hda10.
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