Re: Beige PowerMac G3/266 trouble

On 2006-04-16, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrne44kfr.8l3.mala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Manuel Tobias Schiller <mala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

/dev/hdc2 is the HFS partition on the CD, which is used to hold some
data and the kernel image in a format that the Mac's firmware can
understand...

It holds rather more than that. It also holds the installer and a
minimal set of kernels and packages. The "pool" directory alone is over
100MB, and the "install" directory is over 70MB.

Exactly. I just wanted to say that this fs is not needed to boot up the
installation system, it will later be mounted by the installer when the
data is needed.

... the partition used as root during installation is located on
the ram disk, so entering /dev/ram is probably better.

Do you understand the difference between the "initrd" and "root" kernel
parameters?

I think so. I'll tell you what I believe to remember about it and you
correct me if I'm wrong. I'm always happy to learn... ;)

Basically, the initrd parameter gives the kernel an image with which it
can fill a ram disk. I believte that initrd is in fact a boot loader
parameter, because the kernel does not know yet how to reach the image one
specifies; the boot loader (BootX) in your case will load that image into
RAM and tell the kernel where to find it. If you want the ram disk that
is constructed from the initrd image (which is usually compressed and
needs to be decompressed before usage if I remember correctly) to become
the root fs so you can boot from it, you need to specify /dev/ram or
something similar to get that ram disk as root device.

But I'd try first if you
really need to specify anything at all, just leave the initrd setting
blank and see if it works...

Already tried that. It hangs even earlier in the boot process.

Sorry, I believed I remebered some kernels which had an initrd appended
just after the kernel image in the same file - might have been on a
different system, or I may be wrong there which is quite easily
possible. I've done too many tricky installations on too many trick
machines to remember a single one exactly.

Well, if mounting the root device fails, my kernel usually just panics...

I get that if I specify an invalid root device (like "/dev/hdc" instead
of "/dev/hdc2").

All the better. That's what I would expect. Still, booting directly off
the CD fs and not from the initrd image seems to be a bad idea to me
because the loader on the CD which would boot the installer if the open
firmware implementation on your beige G3 supported it would also load
that initrd image first and use the resulting ram disk as root device;
I'm pretty sure about that.

Kind regards,

Manuel
--
Homepage: http://www.hinterbergen.de/mala
OpenPGP: 0xA330353E (DSA) or 0xD87D188C (RSA)
.

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