Hi Lucas, On September 26, 2018 2:46:43 AM PDT, Lucas <ostrogoth...@airmail.cc> wrote: >I recently got my hands on a 1.42GHZ Emac with a faulty disk drive, is >it possible to use a usb or firewire external disk drive to install >OpenBSD and if not is there another way to install OpenBSD on my Emac? > >Thanks.
If I remember right, USB worked fine on my eMac. It's apparently hit or miss, but if you have a newer eMac (I think the 1.42GHz counts as "newer" here) you should be fine. I don't remember needing to do anything *too* fancy on the OFW prompt, though (just a matter of finding the device; http://www.mediacaster.nl/usb_boot_imac_powerpc_g5.html is a good set of instructions, though you'll obviously need to boot bsd.rd instead of BootX ;) ). FireWire should work without issue; I don't know how well OpenBSD *specifically* works with it (I don't have any FireWire drives on hand to test), but Macs themselves specifically support(ed) it (Firewire is to pre-Thunderbolt Macs as USB is to Wintel PCs in terms of native platform support / integration). On that note, if you have another PC (e.g. another Mac) with a working FireWire port, it should be possible to put the eMac in Target Disk Mode, plug it into your other PC, and copy bsd.rd + the install files to your eMac (and boot bsd.rd via the OFW prompt). This will work regardless of whether or not the eMac still has OS X installed at all, let alone in working condition. Best of luck! -- Ryan S. Northrup (RyNo) north...@yellowapple.us
