Re: Debian Installer GRUB test image available

[John Ogness <powerpc@ogness.net>]

On 2019-05-04, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> The boot script has:
>
> <BOOT-SCRIPT>
> boot &device;:&partition;,\System\Library\CoreServices\grub.elf
> </BOOT-SCRIPT>

I believe this boot script is causing a problem when trying to boot from
USB. Normally I would do:

    boot usb0/disk:,\\BootX

Note that no partition is specified. If a partition is specified, it
invokes mac-parts (at least for my iBook G4). But that causes a problem
because the ISO image has an MSDOS partition table. By not specifying
the partition, the open firmware is able to find the first MSDOS
partition.

However, for the boot script, it is replacing "&partition;" with ":"
yielding:

    boot usb0/disk::,\System\Library\CoreServices\grub.elf

The extra ":" is causing a problem. So for now I can manually start grub
with:

    boot usb0/disk:,\System\Library\CoreServices\grub.elf

But I think if the boot script was:

<BOOT-SCRIPT>
boot &device;:,\System\Library\CoreServices\grub.elf
</BOOT-SCRIPT>

Then I would be able to do the expected:

    boot usb0/disk:,\\BootX

This is all probably special case iBook G4 issues. But I wanted to
mention it since it is pretty obvious a lot of people are tripping over
it.

It would be nice if there was some way to communicate to open firmware
to do MSDOS partition scanning first and that a specified partition
number is an MSDOS partition number. But I have yet to see a way to do
that.

John Ogness