macppc - Powerbook 12"

[Bryan C. Everly]

Hi,

I'm trying to set up an infrastructure where I can test my ports work
on as many processor architectures as possible. To that end, I set up
an i386 box (an old Thinkpad T21), a sparc64 box (my old SunBlade 100)
and am now trying to recycle my old 12" Powerbook so I can do 32-bit
PPC builds.

Unfortunately, I'm hitting a wall. I have done everything in my power
to get this to boot after the install but I keep getting the "missing
system folder" graphic and can't boot from OpenFirmware.

I dedicated the entire disk to OpenBSD and took the default disk
layout (there is an "i" MSDOS partition of 1M at the front of the
drive) but it still won't boot.

If anyone could please point out the n00b mistake I made, I will be
more than happy to take my medicine. I've read the docs over and over,
searched here to no avail and my general Google-fu failed me yet
again.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Bryan

[Ryan S. Northrup]

Howdy!

Just as a sanity check, have you already done the "Autobooting OpenBSD/macppc" step in the INSTALL.macppc instructions? It sounds like OpenFirmware isn't finding something to boot, as if it's still looking for OS X. I'd boot into OpenFirmware and (per that step) run both "setenv auto-boot? true" and "setenv boot-device hd:,ofwboot" in the resulting Forth prompt.

If that doesn't fix it, then further information on the exact Powerbook model would probably be useful.

Thanks,
-- Ryan

[Bryan C. Everly]

Hi Ryan.

Yep, I had double-checked that. OpenFirmware on macppc is pretty much
identical to what I have on the SunBlade 100.

Here's an interesting tidbit. When I re-ran the installer with the
default partition scheme and a fully-dedicated OpenBSD disk, I noticed
that mkfs either wasn't being ran on the wd0i partition (MSDOS) or if
it was, it wasn't reporting anything (I saw mkfs results from all of
the 4.2BSD partitions so I guessed it wasn't ran).

Given that clue, I was able to get the laptop to autoboot by manually
doing the following post install:

mkfs_msdos /dev/rwd0i
mount -t msdos /dev/wd0i /mnt
mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /mnt2
cp /mnt2/ofwboot /mnt
umount /mnt2
umount /mnt

So it looks like the default 5.7 CD that I bought from the OpenBSD
store wasn't formatting the MSDOS partition in a situation where the
user is dedicating the entire hard drive to OpenBSD. I'm probably an
edge case (guessing a lot of people keep OSX on these boxes as well)
but is that something someone could look into for 5.8 so that future
people in my camp don't have to figure this out?


Thanks,
Bryan

[Carlos Fenollosa]

Can you boot into OpenBSD manually? That is, getting to the OpenFirmware prompt and then running “boot hd;ofwboot /bsd”?

Carlos

[Bryan Everly]

I can now. The problem was that the ofwboot file wasn't copied to the
msdos partition and the partition wasn't formatted. Once I did that
all was well and I can boot straight in.

Thanks,
Bryan