Mac mini and FreeBSD - some initial details

Garance A Drosihn drosih at rpi.edu
Sun Jan 23 21:03:31 PST 2005


At 10:55 PM -0500 1/23/05, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>
>It downloaded the files, installed everything, and I could reboot
>the system.  Further information on what you might want to do at that
>point are described in:
>
>  http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/miniinst.txt

The instructions in this file includes the section:

     a) leave the CD in the drive, break into OpenFirmware at
        boot, and

            0 > boot cd:,\boot\loader hd:11

        (or hd:X, where X is the partition number that FreeBSD
         was installed on)

     or

     b) Boot into OSX and copy /boot/loader from the miniinst CD
        into / on OSX. Reboot, break into OpenFirmware, and

            0 > boot hd:loader hd:11

I couldn't get the second one to work for me.  In my case, I have
a MacOS 10 install on hd #9, with freebsd on hd #5.  The following
did seem to work:

            0 > boot hd:9,loader hd:5

in fact, I copied the /boot/loader file into a file called /fbsd_loader
on that MacOS 10 installation, just so it'd be more obvious the file
had nothing to do with MacOS 10.  So, I use 'fbsd_loader' instead of
'loader' in the above.

I have tried to come up with some kind of trick where I could select
a MacOS 10 partition, and have the machine boot up the freebsd boot
loader instead of the MacOS 10 kernel, but none of those tricks have
worked...

-- 
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


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