PowerMac G4 booting from memstick image

[Mehul Sanghvi]

I was able to get FBSD-13 installed !

I did two things so am not sure which one actually worked

1.  I changed to using an older USB stick I had

2.  I did the following at loader prompt

    OK  unload
    OK  set kern.smp.disabled=“1”
    OK  boot-conf


Hopefully I did that correctly and that was the fix rather than changing the USB stick


The problem I have now is that OpenFirmware is setup to boot NetBSD and I don’t know what I need
to set for the boot-device and boot-file variables in order for auto-boot to work.  At the moment I am unable to boot manually either.

cheers,

   mehul


> On Apr 19, 2021, at 22:44 , Brandon Bergren <bdragon at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2021, at 9:16 PM, Mehul Sanghvi wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Apr 19, 2021, at 21:42 , Brandon Bergren <bdragon at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> This may be caused by a descynced timebase. At the loader prompt, do "boot kern.smp.disabled=1" (or set it in the loader environment) and see if that fixes it.
>>> 
>> 
>> This would be after installing freebsd yes ? 
> 
> I meant while booting into the installer. You can hit a button during the countdown and boot with extra options.
> 
> Oh, and after some discussion in IRC, I realized that I was misremembering what I still needed on the G4 side, and it should theoretically work on *all* SMP G4s as-is.
> 
>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Having gotten to the point of selecting Install,  the keyboard wouldn’t 
>>>> work.  An Apple keyboard, hooked up via KVM switch, which was working 
>>>> just fine upto that moment.  
>>> 
>>> I've seen this for some reason on ADB. I can usually work around it by using a USB keyboard. But it could be due to screwed up timers (due to timebase desync)
>>> 
>> 
>> The Apple keyboard is an USB keyboard but I worked around it by using a 
>> spare USB keyboard I had.
> 
> OK.
> 
>> 
>> 
>> The ISO got past the mountroot issue, but too many messages of the form
>> 
>>    CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
>> 
>> 
>> I may have to see if I have other USB flash dries around and try those. 
>> It could very well be the USB flash.  I didn’t realize the G4s would 
>> be picky about the stick that is used.
> 
> Well, generally the problem tends to be that the stick just plain doesn't show up as a disk at 1 device in OF.
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> cheers,
>> 
>>    mehul
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
>  Brandon Bergren
>  bdragon at FreeBSD.org