Extreme difficulty with partitioning on mac powerpc g4 [long]

[Horst Günther Burkhardt III]

On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 11:01 +0800, Nick Coleman wrote:

> 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.

Welcome to FreeBSD, and welcome to Macintosh.

> 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.

That's odd, I found them to be a tad skeleton.

> 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 eventually used Finnix for this at the suggestion of Richard
DeLaurell.

> 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'.
> 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... :)

You and Me Against The World comes to mind.

Would you be interested in improving the PowerPC port page on the
FreeBSD wiki with this information, with me ? :) It would definitely
help other newcomers.

-- Horst.
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