Ethan Benson writes: > what part of: > > Mail-Followup-To: debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org > Mail-Copies-To: nobody > X-No-CC: I subscribe to this list; do not CC me on replies. > > don't you understand?
1. it is in the headers instead of the signature 2. it isn't handled by my crufty old UNIX mail program Have you written a mail program that interprets X-No-CC ? > you demonstrate how little you know about how OldWorld Macintoshes > work. You have forever destroyed my innocent faith in the beauty of Apple hardware. Shame on you! :-( I now declare the modern PC architecture to be a coherent and efficient design. Even the A20 line and MBR are looking good now. > first there are two firmwares in OldWorld PCI macs, the first is > OpenFirmware, an extremely and hideously broken implementation of > OpenFirmware, on most machines its either not capable of reading the > disk at all, or can barly read it. An aborted attempt to switch? It makes no sense to even have the OpenFirmware code if it isn't used. > the next is a 4MB ROM with the core of MacOS burned onto it (on very > old macs this was actually complete enough to boot without any other > media). This is 680x0 code too, isn't it? > it then checks the hard disk, the very first thing it checks on a hard > disk (or CD) is the Driver descriptor map (block 0 of the partition > table) this contains a list of MacOS disk drivers installed on the > disk (in Apple_Driver43 partitions), if no drivers are found the ROM > code rules the disk unbootable and irrelevant, thus ignores it[0]. if > the drivers are found the code in them is loaded to replace the disk > drivers that were burned into the ROM (since they are usually broken On a new system, with "ROM" coming from an HFS partition, the driver partitions make no sense at all. > now its certainly possible for a disk driver to be written which is > free software, or even pretends to be a driver but really acts as a > bootloader, but nobody is all that interested in learning and coding > such a beast, besides that if you ever boot MacOS it may overwrite > this driver to `update' it (macos upgrades typically do this), a fake > driver would probably interfere with use of MacOS at all, but if you > wanted a macos free machine that wouldn't matter i suppose. One would want to make the bootloader be a wrapper that can supply the old driver when booting MacOS, and then write a MacOS program (extension?) to fix up the bootloader at shutdown. Yeah, fat chance anyone would.
