Booting FreeBSD/powerpc from external FireWire drive?

[Paul Mather]

On Oct 5, 2010, at 1:56 PM, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:

> On Tue, 05 Oct 2010 09:16:31 -0400
> Paul Mather <paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu> wrote:
> 
>> It would be nice to be able to have \loader loaded from the external FW drive, too, but this solution works.
> 
> Well, if you follow the instructions[1] at the PPC wiki page[2], to
> create a small Apple bootstrap partition on your firewire drive, does
> it not work?
> 
> The commands are (example substitue your own drive) :
> gpart add -s 800K -t apple-boot ad0
> gpart bootcode -p /mnt/boot/boot1.hfs -i <index of boot partition> ad0
> 
> Note; I have only done this on an internal disk, so I don't know if it
> works for external disks too.
> My sequence was:
> gpart add -s 800K -t '!Apple_Bootstrap' ad1
> dd if=/boot/boot1.hfs of=/dev/ad1s2
> 
> (this was back in June, so perhaps 'gpart bootcode' didn't work then?)
> 
> References:
> 1) http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/ppcinstall.txt
> 2) http://wiki.freebsd.org/powerpc

I followed those instructions during installation to partition the external drive and put boot code on it.  It works when booting from the graphical boot chooser (obtained by holding down the Option key during boot), but I couldn't figure out a way to boot from an external FireWire drive from the OpenFirmware prompt (Cmd-Opt-O-F startup).  All of the examples I could find refer to booting from the internal hard drive or from the CD-ROM drive.

My motivation is that I want to test FreeBSD on a headless Xserve G5 that lacks the capability for a graphical boot chooser, but does allow booting via OpenFirmware over a serial terminal.  The workaround arrived at in my previous message allows booting from the external FireWire drive, but still requires an Install CD or /boot/loader to be present on the internal hard drive.

Cheers,

Paul.