snapshot 19991204 | without sysinst installation

Install NetBSD/ macppc using sysinst

Sysinst is NetBSD standard installation tool. It will be invoked after floppy boot is done.

This document may NOT apply for iMac/B&W G3/PowerBook.
NetBSD Resident with MacOS partition is not just supported. It is just not implemented yet.

Which model is supported is shown in this table.

Making boot floppy

Use suntar or Diskcopy

Getting OF(Open Firmware) prompt

By get OF prompt.
( Some OF requires special setting for ouput setting, see
http://www.linuxppc.org/userguide/output_dev.html

Booting from floppy

Type following command at Open Firmware prompt,
>boot fd:0
And you will get:
erase ^H, werase ^W, kill ^U, intr ^C, status ^T
Terminal type? [vt100] xterm
Erase is backspace.
(I)nstall, (S)hell or (H)alt ?

Drop to the shell and setup network interface

(This part is no longer needed since 1.4.1)

Run sysinst

By responding I for above prompt, you will get following dialogs.

booting from installed disk

Above sysinst will not take care booting parameters ( in case with macppc ). Printenv at OF prompt will show you all the varible name, current settings and default values. value names related to boot are shown below.
variable namedefault valuemy example
auto-boot? truefalse
boot-device /AAPL,ROM ata/ata-disk@0:0
If you get auto-boot? false, you will be prompted what to do every time you power on. The examples for manual booting are:
>boot scsi/sd@3:0
>boot ata/ata-disk@0:0
etc, depending on SCSI/IDE or SCSI id's.

To know the available alias for booting device, type devalias at Open Firmware prompt.

If boot-device is set properly, you just need to type boot even when auto-boot? set false. My machine example here.

StarMax oddities

If you run StarMax (from Motorola), and installing onto IDE disk, kernel booting may stop while probing wdc1.

To avoid this problem, take one out of following three.

setup /etc files

macppc version sysinst may not take care /etc files. See another table for the list to setup

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