imac rev D 7.0 rel booting issue

[Richard DeLaurell]

Moving  the / partition within the first 8g did fix the situation and 7 now
boots up with:

0>boot hd:,\loader hd:8

I will give it a simpler devalias once I'm in my comfort-zone that
everything is all squared away (generally takes about a month).

Just a couple of end-user observations:

pdisk does not seem to have been accessible on the FreeBSD installation
disk--perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place--though it made
(re-)partitioning the unix part of the hd fairly simple.

On the other hand, disklabel in FB seems much more straight-forward than
that for NetBSD.

Thank you for all of your help.

Richard DeLaurell


On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Shane Ambler <FreeBSD at shaneware.biz> wrote:

> Peter Grehan wrote:
>
>> Hi Richard,
>>
>>  I installed FreeBSD 7 on partitions 11-16; those begin at 11g.
>>>
>> ..
>>
>>> I seem to remember something about the imacs having an 8g limit.
>>> Is this what I am running into?
>>>
>>
>> I believe this might be the case: it's a limit with OpenFirmware,
>> which the FreeBSD loader uses to access disk blocks.
>>
>
> I do believe all the coloured imacs have the 8G limit.
>
>  Why does it not affect the NB2 installation?
>>>
>>
>> As you mentioned, the NetBSD kernel is in the os9 partition, which is
>> < 8G. Once the o/s has booted, NetBSD (and FreeBSD) will use hardware
>> to directly access the drives and
>>
>> An issue you have seen is that the FreeBSD loader has no HFS filesystem
>> support, so it can't boot a kernel that is on the same HFS
>> partition that it may itself live on.
>>
>>
> Even MacOS 9 & X has this issue - you may need to reorganise to get
> around it.
>
> The technical side is that "the partition that contains the kernel must
> be within the first 8G of the drive".
> Once the kernel has started up it can then mount partitions that are
> outside the 8G that hold the rest of your software. (This would be up to
> 120G I think)
>
> With NetBSD booting from the os9 partition the kernel is starting from
> there, once running it can access it's partition that goes outside the 8G.
> It's not actually booting from the 10G partition you have for it.
>
> You will need say a <200M partition inside the 8G to hold the FreeBSD
> kernel and /etc to get it started so it can then get to it's main partition
> for the rest. I'm not certain how much more is needed - I would normally
> have /bin /sbin on the root partition but I don't think you need them to get
> things started. You may want them there for emergency recovery though.
>
>
> --
>
> Shane Ambler
> FreeBSD (at) ShaneWare (dot) Biz
>
> http://ShaneWare.Biz
>