Booting FreeBSD/powerpc from external FireWire drive?

[fbsd23 at sol42.com]

On 1 Oct 2010, at 17:44, Paul Mather wrote:
> Can anyone help me figure out the appropriate OpenFirmware command to boot FreeBSD from the external FW drive?  The "devalias" command reports I have "fw" and "fwx" aliases, which I presume refer to FireWire.  Alas, I can't fathom what the boot command arguments would be.  I followed the gpart partitioning scheme listed in the FreeBSD/powerpc install instructions at http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/ppcinstall.txt with an 800K apple-boot partition as the first one in the APM.

Hello there.  This is what I do to boot 8.1 on a Mac mini G4 from a USB disk:

1) press Alt+Command+O+F when booting to get to the OpenFirmware prompt

2) type "boot cd:,\boot\loader ud:N" where N is your FreeBSD root filesystem
   partition; you need the install CD-ROM for this
   you'll have to type "fw" instead of "ud" which is the first USB disk
   if you copy /boot/loader from the CD to the root of the Mac OS X disk,
   you can type "boot hd:\loader ud:N" instead (and need no CD to boot)

3) IF mounting root fails because the FireWire disk is not detected yet (this
   happens to me every time, the "set hw.usb.ehci.no_hs=1" trick doesn't work
   for me), type "ufs:/dev/da0sN" (same N as above) after the ROOT MOUNT ERROR
   message and the system will come up as usual

Regards.
-Daniel