Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 14:02:20 -0700 From: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@xcllnt.net> To: ppc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Setting up a bootable disk from scratch Message-ID: <709598C1-D05C-42D0-96D4-EC8E076E5BE3@xcllnt.net>
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All, I'm trying to setup my iMac for FreeBSD. I replaced the MacOS X disk with an empty disk to preserve my Mac OS X for now. So, what I have currently is a netbooting FreeBSD machine, with / over NFS and an empty ATA disk. See for an almost up-to-date dmesg output and a pciconf output: http://www.xcllnt.net/~marcel/machines/imac/ My first step was to get a Mac partition table on the disk. I ended up hacking parted to compile on FreeBSD, with hardcoded values for the ATA disk in my iMac. With parted I put an empty partition table on the disk. It's seen by the kernel: imac% sysctl -b kern.geom.conftxt 0 DISK ad0 9115288064 512 hd 16 sc 63 1 APPLE ad0s2 9115254784 512 i 1 o 32768 ty Apple_Free sn Extra 1 APPLE ad0s1 32256 512 i 0 o 512 ty Apple_partition_map sn Apple What I want to do is add one or more FreeBSD partitions, of which one is formatted in such a way that I can use it to boot. I read that OpenFirmware boots from HFS and CD9660 filesystems, so I'm thinking of creating an CD9660 partition with boot related stuff, a regular UFS2 partition for / and a swap partition. I tried using sysinstall, but that wasn't fruitful. It sees the free partition, but doesn't seem to create more partitions or even sub-partitions (i.e. BSD label) under the free-partition. My questions: 1. Am I getting lost in the woods and am I better off abandoning this venture in favor of established methods? 2. Is sysinstall broken WRT to partitioning currently or is it supposed to work? 3. Am I correct when I say that all I need is an image of /boot on some OFW recognized partition in order to make the machine boot FreeBSD? Thanks in advance, -- Marcel Moolenaar USPA: A-39004 marcel@xcllnt.net
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