FreeBSD 7 Install on an older Mac Mini

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 3:50 PM -0800 1/27/09, Colin Dick wrote:
>
>   So, as long as it boots, I will be in business.  Ugh, it didn't
>boot.  The build completed but I think I am going to have to do
>some OFW magic to get it to boot.  I have seen a document on this
>list or referenced in this list that may point me in the right
>direction.  If anyone has specifics to save me some research,
>please feel free to chime in!

check the end of:

http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/iso_install.txt

(which was probably also on the 7.1 install CD).  The heading on
that web page says "FreeBSD/PPC 6.0-RELEASE install.iso", but I
expect the section about booting issues is still correct.  Read
the part down at:  "5. First boot"

In my case, I copy the file "/boot/loader" to the MacOS partition
that was the first partition created on my internal hard disk.  I
name the copy "fbsd_loader" just so I remember what it is if I
come across it sometime when running MacOS, and wonder what it's
doing there.  And then whenever I want to boot up freebsd I use
the openfirmware command:

    boot hd:3,fbsd_loader hd:5

It looks like you did not create a MacOS partition, so you won't
be able to use that.  But the iso_install write-up tells you how
you can boot up using the initial freebsd install CD.

Note that I'm pretty sure that OpenFirmware still has no idea about
how to find any file on a FreeBSD-formatted partition, so I think
you will be stuck with using the CD-booting method.  The write-up
provides a sample command of:

    boot cd:,\boot\loader hd:11

but in your case "/" is on "ad0s3", so you'd want that "hd:11" to
be "hd:3".

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu