On 11-Oct-2001 Michael Schmitz wrote: >> > a good explanation (or a link to an Howto or a FAQ on it) would be greatly >> > appreciated. I really need to solve this problem... >> > >> >> I can hazard a guess that the reason you're not hearing anything here, is >> that the capability to make a boot floppy for powerpc's doesn't exist yet. >> You're plowing new ground, there aren't any FAQs or HowTo's. > > It's a Mac, right? One of the old ones, with RealBrokenFirmware, at that? > If that OF version cannot boot off a floppy directly, you're out of luck > (if I understood Ethan's post on that topic right, you'd need to have > MacOS drivers on that floppy, these are proprietary and cannot be > distributed by Debian. See the archives for this).
yes it is an oldworld Mac with a really broken openfirmware, but I am able to boot from a floppy disk. In fact the Debian ones work well and I just need to add nfs support to it (in fact to powermac/images-1.44/boot-floppy-hfs.img) and change the default framebuffer resolution a bit... So I took the .config from kernel-patch-2.2.19-powerpc, patched the 2.2.19 kernel sources, added nfs support, recompiled and put that kernel back to the boot floppy, blessed the floppy with hattrib... but either the kernel I created is not good or I missed something because I can not render the floppy bootable. Note that when I redo this same procedure with the original kernel coming from the boot floppy itself, it boots well again. So I think this could be a problem with the type of kernel I use, is this vmlinux.coff that I should use for that bootdisk? Or an other kernel? Do I need to use Miboot to make this floppy bootable again? > > Even if OF was up to the task: 'floppy' and 'without user intervention' it is. > doesn't sound quite right to me. Last time I checked, MacOS would spit out > the floppy on shutdown/reboot. But there is no MacOs in this Mac anymore, and as far as I remember the floppy is not ejected (and that would not have been a big problem anyway). > If that doesn't scare you - the CHRP boot scripts commonly used to pick > Linux or MockOS, plus whatever OF-loadable bootstrap, plus some code in > the kernel to extract and relocate a compressed kernel, might do the > trick. > > If _I_ may hazard a guess: it's probably been considered too hard and not > useful enough to try by others. You need the feature, you're in the best > position to implement it. > > Michael I don't thinks I need to do anything complicated or unusual. I just want to make the same boot disk than what Debian ships (the famous /woody/main/disks-powerpc/3.0.13-2001-08-25/powermac/images-1.44/boot-floppy-hfs .img bootdisk) but with a custom kernel. So do you know what steps were used to make this boot floppy?
