Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:14:27 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Best options for disk-formatting on PowerPC? (mac-mini) Message-ID: <p06240814c59afc49c1f7@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <p0624080fc59a619b816f@[128.113.24.47]> References: <p0624080fc59a619b816f@[128.113.24.47]>
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At 6:13 PM -0500 1/19/09, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>
>What I have is a new-to-me MacMini, with a brand new disk in it, and
>nothing installed on that disk. I also have an external FW drive
>which has all the freebsd filesystems from my other Mac-Mini install.
>I've just updated the system on that drive so it is the up-to-date
>version of FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE.
>So I took the new mac-mini and booted it into firewire target mode.
>I hooked that and my other firewire disk up to the older mac mini,
>and booted that Mac-mini into MacOS 10.4.
Well, I've made some progress, but I still don't understand all of
what went on. At this point I'm pretty tired out after spending most
of the weekend on it, so this won't cover all the details. At the
end, you'll see that I do have it booting, but there's some things
it would be nice to fix (if possible!).
Older mini: PPC 1.42 GHz
Newer mini: PPC 1.50 GHz (with brand new empty HD)
External disk: One of those combination disk/FW-hub/USB-hub things
which is the same size and shape as a Mac Mini.
All freebsd partitions (except swap) were on the
external FW drive. It has 6.x and 7.x systems.
It seemed the easiest way to get things from the old MM and the HD
to the new MM was to put the new MM into FW target mode, and then
connect the hub to the old MM, and the new MM to the hub. So I did,
and booted up 10.4.<something> wbich was installed on the old MM.
First I partitioned the new disk to have several unix partitions,
with two MacOS partitions at the end of the disk. I then booted
into 7.x, and the FW disk in the hub had moved from device "da0*" to
"da1*" (due to the new MM being "da0*". I fixed fstab, rebooted,
and everything I tried seemed to work fine... EXCEPT: Apparently
FreeBSD couldn't see the individual partitions under /dev/da0s* ,
even though it had no trouble finding all the ones under /dev/da1s* .
There was a /dev/da0, but no slices under it. I tried running
sysinstall, and it would only let me select disks AD0 or DA1 .
I tried several ways to get around this, with no luck.
It occurred to me that every other time I had done this, I always
and a MacOS volume as the first partition on the disk. So I
rebooted into MacOS, and reformatted the new disk with one MacOS
partition, several Unix partitions, and then a second MacOS volume.
I then rebooted back into freebsd 7.x, and now the FW disk in the
older hub had moved back to "da0". I fixed fstab to match, and
rebooted again. Now I had /dev/ad0* and /dev/da0*, but no /dev/da1
at all. Absolutely no evidence that I had two firewire drives, even
though both drives looked and worked perfectly fine in MacOS.
Fine. I shut everything down, disconnected the old MM, and plugged
the FW disk+hub into the new MM. Installed MacOS 10.4 into the new
MM, and booted up off of that. Everything looks fine. I then
rebooted into openfirmware, and typed in the commands:
show-devs fw
boot hd:3,fbsd_loader fw/<long-string>:9
partition 9 is the /-filesystem for the 7.x system. Total death.
The loader does start up, but it complains that it can't load the
kernel and drops back to a user prompt. I then ask it to "lsdev" --
and it claims it can't find *any* devices! I power down, power back
up, and try this again. Again it fails, in the exact same way.
Eventually I boot up the 6.x system on the external FW disk. It
boots up perfectly fine (except that I have to fix fstab yet again!).
I have several things I want to check out, and reboot several times
into 6.x. No problems.
I try to boot into 7.x again. It fails again, but in staring at the
screen I realize I typo'ed the <long-string> part. Redo. Fails. I
again notice I typo'ed it. Redo. This time I make absolutely certain
I type in the right string before hitting 'return'. It fails. Redo.
It fails. Redo again. It fails. It occurs to me that for at least
some of those attempts, I had started typo the strong, but noticed
the error before hitting 'return'. So I just hit the 'delete' key to
remove the error, and re-typed it. And each time after it failed, I
would even do a 'show' command in the loader, and I could see that
the string it picked up looked exactly like I expected it to.
I tried one more time, and this time I made sure I didn't make any
mistakes, and never had to hit the delete key. This time it works!
Apparently I typo'ed (one way or another) every time I tried to boot
into 7.x, but never when booting into 6.x. I managed to do this even
though the only difference between the two boot commands is the last
digit I have to type. Geez, what are the odds?
What's worse, I have a vague feeling that I ran into this same
problem when doing the initial installs on my first Mac-mini. I
haven't had the problem for years now, because I defined a device
alias in open-firmware on the older MM, so for years all I've had
to type is:
boot hd:3,fbsd_loader fw-d0:9
I'll define another device-alias in the new MM, once I figure out
how I want the disk partitioned.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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