Installing FreeBSD 6.2 on PowerPC 7400 (G4)

[Peter Grehan]

Hi Robin,

> When I got home, I reformatted my drives, and partitioned into 3 sections:
> 
> swap UFS
> root HSF+
> Mac OS X Extended+Journalized.

  Other than the partition that is running OSX, the types of the other 
partitions don't matter. FreeBSD treats them as raw partitions without 
respect to what type they have been set to in the partition table.

> 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!!?!?

  OSX can't understand FreeBSD's UFS format, so it won't mount the volume.

  The next thing to do is to

   - boot OSX
   - mount the FreeBSD install CD
   - copy /boot/loader from the CDROM to /loader on OSX
   - reboot into OpenFirmware
   - remembering the partition number that FreeBSD root lives on (e.g. 8 
for the purposes of this example)

      0 > boot hd:loader hd:8

  .. and then you should be away.

later,

Peter.