Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 04:54:54 -0500 From: "Richard DeLaurell" <richard.delaurell@gmail.com> To: "Shane Ambler" <FreeBSD@shaneware.biz>, "Peter Grehan" <grehan@freebsd.org>, freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: imac rev D 7.0 rel booting issue Message-ID: <4324dbec0808020254v4c16ec95p6c87a03db931719b@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4892A7C4.3030105@ShaneWare.Biz> References: <20080801122438.EFA73657@dommail.onthenet.com.au> <4892A7C4.3030105@ShaneWare.Biz>
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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@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 >home | help
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