Extreme difficulty with partitioning on mac powerpc g4 [long]

[Nick Coleman]

> Good evening. 
> 
> I'm having some significant trouble using the install.iso for ppc. This
> trouble being (with both 7.0-RELEASE and 7.1-BETA) that the installer
> insists on doing its partitioning with fdisk. I have used linux fdisk to
> make the partition tables up, and failing this attempted some semblance
> of partitioning with Mac OS X Disk Utility (an idea taken from OpenBSD
> install docs for ppc). I also attempted to use GParted, and none of
> these attempts at partitioning are being picked up. 

FWIW, I'm brand new to FreeBSD and Mac, so none of this is gospel, just 
what worked for me.  It took me about 4 or 5 attempts before I got it to 
work.  This is for 7.0 by the way.

I ended up spending quite a few days reading various sites to get it to 
work, but successfully in the end.  I found the netBSD instructions for 
the PPC to be quite helpful, and Peter Grehan's instructions too.

I will go into a fair bit of detail for those reading this later, might 
save a few days of research.  This is what I did:

 From what I understand, you need to use mac-fdisk (Debian, Mac OS X; I 
think it might even just be a frontend to parted) or parted.  I used 
parted for a PPC build, in a Ubuntu live CD session.  Ubuntu's latest 
releases don't support PPC, but their 6.x build is still maintained and 
does support it.   I downloaded the live CD (700MB just to run parted!). 
  Perhaps you could do it easier with a smaller build of a live CD, but 
I have a fast connection and by that point (tearing out hair!) couldn't 
be bothered faffing around to find something else.  (BTW, does Gparted 
support ppc?  I didn't think it did, so I didn't explore it any further 
other than reading their website intro.)

I booted the Ubuntu live CD, opened a terminal session, ran parted, and 
created all the partitions.  You need to create all the partitions now, 
so plan ahead on how many partitions and their sizing.  I believe you 
can't create just one partition hoping to use sysinstall in FreeBSD 
later to subdivide it into the various partitions, you need to create 
them all now.  Note the partition (slice) numbers and sizes for later.

I then booted into the FreeBSD install CD.  In my experience, you must 
use the boot iso and not the disk1 iso.  For some reason, sysinstall was 
never successful in installing the packages if I had booted from disk1.

In sysinstall, I [C]reated the partitions by using the existing ones I 
had already set up.  I set it to rewrite file systems and swap.  Do this 
even if you have a half-finished install already in the partitions.  I 
was never successful at completing a previously failed install, so gave 
up and rewrote the file systems, thereby losing everything I had done in 
previous sessions.  After I tried this method, it worked.  Previously it 
failed every time at the point of installing packages (write error -1, 
couldn't write to ...etc) after downloading them.

I installed packages with FTP to a local mirror.  Several times it 
failed with "couldn't find packages/INDEX".  Timeout bug?  Again, if 
this happens, bite the bullet and start again, rewriting the file system 
in the partitions.  I was never successful at restarting a failed 
install.  Ha, I probably downloaded the entire distro about 5 times, 
lucky my ISP quota was unusually empty this month.

So that's it.  I ended up doing a minimum install because I got sick of 
downloading all those packages just for the install to fail.  I ended up 
with a minimum just so I could get to a shell after rebooting.

On a side note, by this stage, Open Firmware and I have quite a close 
relationship. :).  Open Firmware is my bro'.

> 
> It all comes back to me hitting "custom install" as I always do, and the
> damned partitioner, and me trying to do _anything_ results in a SIG11
> (Segmentation Violation i believe). 
> 
> a) Is there a known workaround?
> ` - b) If there is, why are there no docs anywhere on the internet?
>    ` - c) If (following either assistance or dumb luck) I get it 
>           working, would a "walkthrough" be welcomed? (see lack of docs)
>  |- d) If no known workaround, are there any suggestions from the ppc
>        devs and users on this ML?
> 

To be honest, I was surprised at how little info there is out on the 
net.  I found only 3 (!) sites with good practical info.   I wonder if 
it is just that there are very few people actually installing FreeBSD 
for the first time on a G4.  Perhaps just you and me... :)


-- 
Nick