Installing FreeBSD 6.2 on PowerPC 7400 (G4)

[Robin Stevens]

Hello again. Thank you all for your help!

When I got home, I reformatted my drives, and partitioned into 3 sections:

swap UFS
root HSF+
Mac OS X Extended+Journalized.

well, needless to say, that didn't seem to work. After it was all
installed, I couldn't mount those partitions from OS X. The weird
thing was that I couldn't mount root. Swap seemed to be ok. So, I went
into Disk Utility, and wiped root. Made sure it was still HSF+, and
rebooted. I tried installing FreeBSD again, and it went smoothly. When
I came back into OS X, there was nothing in root. It was completely
empty. Why!!?!?

I mean, the installation went all the way through. How could it be
empty? Grr this is frustrating.

I tried the same thing with Peter's miniinstall, 6.2, and 7.0
-SNAPSHOT. Same results.

What am I possibly doing wrong? I tried pretty much every combination
between UFS and HSF+.

Thanks guys :)

-- Robin

On 11/6/07, Peter Grehan <grehan at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Hi Robin,
>
> > Partitions:
> > 4.00 MBs of HSF+ (Mac OS Extended) for /boot
> > 256.00 MBs of HSF+ (Mac OS Extended) for swap
> > *.00 GBs of HSF+ (Mac OS Extended) for / (root)
> >
> > So I'll have three partitions. I think that should be enough.
>
>   I use an OSX install to re-partition a system, and to set up OSX so
> that I can boot into that, and also use that to copy the FreeBSD loader
> to the root directory so it can be read from the loader.
>
> > I've got 6.2 iso on a CD-R, and I'll be booting off that from the mac
> > (either with the 'C' key or via OpenFirmware)
>
>   That's the next step once the re-partitioning has been done.
>
> > Once there, I will follow the instructions on screen, and partition (
> > apparently I do it again here? I'm not sure, maybe its just telling
> > FreeBSD which partitions to use ) my / (root).
>
>   That's right. The fastest way is to dump all the filesystems onto a
> single disk partition, and use another one for swap. Much like what you
> have above without the /boot partition.
>
> > Then I guess I need to drop down into 'disklabel' and tell it to use
> > my swap partition as the swap. I'm not sure how to accomplish this
> > without interrupting the installation process. Tips/explainations on
> > this would be great.
>
>   Shouldn't need to do that: the partition can be marked as 'swap' in
> sysinstall.
>
> > What do you all think?
>
>   Let us know how it goes. I think I have the exact same config (400MHz
> G4), so should be able to help out if there are any h/w issues.
>
> later,
>
> Peter.
>