Booting FreeBSD/powerpc from external FireWire drive?

[Paul Mather]

On Oct 5, 2010, at 3:33 PM, Gary wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Paul Mather wrote:
> 
>> 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).
> 
> Presumably you have it temporarily connected to a monitor in order to
> learn that holding Option lets you boot from the external drive. In
> that case, have you tried booting in to OS X and choosing that drive
> from the "Startup Disk" system preferences?

The external drive is flagged as "unrecognised" under Mac OS X, and I get a window pop up asking me if I want to initialise it or ignore it when it is connected.  I am presuming this is because the partitions don't look sufficiently "OS X"-like.

Here are what the partitions look like:

powerpc# gpart show -r
=>       5  78140155  ad0  APM  (37G)
         5    262203       - free -  (128M)
    262208  77877936    2  Apple_HFS  (37G)
  78140144        16       - free -  (8.0K)

=>      18  78165342  da0  APM  (37G)
        18      1600    1  Apple_Bootstrap  (800K)
      1618   2097152    2  FreeBSD-UFS  (1.0G)
   2098770   8388608    3  FreeBSD-swap  (4.0G)
  10487378  16777216    4  FreeBSD-UFS  (8.0G)
  27264594   2097152    5  FreeBSD-UFS  (1.0G)
  29361746   4194304    6  FreeBSD-UFS  (2.0G)
  33556050  16777216    7  FreeBSD-UFS  (8.0G)
  50333266  27832094    8  FreeBSD-UFS  (13G)

where ad0 is the internal drive (with Mac OS X installed) and da0 is the external drive (with FreeBSD installed).

(BTW, right now I am doing all my testing on an external FireWire hooked up to a PowerBook G4 laptop that does have a screen and built-in keyboard, so that I can familiarise myself with the install and boot process in preparation for hooking it up to the Xserve G5 that lacks these graphical amenities.)

Cheers,

Paul.