Mailing List Archive

g3 iBook can't boot directly from cd
Howdy folks,
I'm having problems bootstrapping my install on a clamshell g3 ibook.
The cdrom drive is very old now and will no read CD-R media, although
commercial media like OSX cds and OpenBSD cd set work fine. I have an
external firewire CDRW drive, but it is not possible to boot to it from
OpenFirmware.

So in the past, if an operating system installer would let me, I could
put the yaboot, yaboot.conf, kernel, and ramdisk image all on the first
HFS partition on the hard drive, and then boot things from OpenFirmware
prompt.

I am trying to do this with Gentoo, but I am having a problem. The
kernel and ramdisk load, but even if use the "dofirewire" kernel
argument, the firewire drive never spins up, and I end up at the "enter
root device or "shell"" prompt.

I haven't found any kernel modules in the ramdisk filesystem there, I
poked around in the busybox.

I have the squashfs image on the HFS partition, and on a usb stick. I
can't seem to mount the usb stick, the HFS partition, or get to the
firewire cdrom.

I discovered the "bootfrom=" kernel argument, but I have no idea what to
feed it. Can I get to anything using that that I can't get to from the
busybox?

Any ideers?



thanks

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