[openfirmware] Using Open Firmware as a boot manager

Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl.openfirmware at telemetry.co.uk
Wed Mar 16 18:43:37 CET 2011


No rush, obviously.

OK, that's working. What is c actually representing here- the entire disc?

I've set myself up a disk with DOS and Linux which .partitions c 
describes as

1	Primary	Yes	FAT-16>32M	37
2	Primary	No	Extended	2252
2	Logical	No	FAT-16>32M	2045
3	Logical	No	0x82		207

That final partition isn't right, it's actually filling all the 
otherwise-unused space on a 6Gb disc, but let's skip that for the moment.

What do I define d as so I can look at the content of the second FAT 
partition? What is disk at 0- a reference to a block?

What do I need to do to look in the Linux filesystem, including 
identifying what file in /boot can be booted? Can I then boot/load it?

Mitch Bradley wrote:
> I'm traveling now and will be home tomorrow.  I'll tell you more when I 
> get home, but for now, you can try this:
> 
> ok devalias c /pci/pci-ide at 1f,1/ide at 0/disk at 0
> ok .partitions c
> ok dir c:\
> 
> On 3/16/2011 3:57 AM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>> Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>>
>>>> http://www.firmworks.com/QuickRef.html
>>>
>>> Thanks, I'd missed that and had been working through the IEEE doc.
>>
>> OK, really trying baby steps here. Accepting that OFW doesn't implement
>> or allow access to a PC-style BIOS, so can't be used to load any OS that
>> makes BIOS calls (even if only during initialisation), how can I use it
>> to examine the partition table, boot sectors, and possibly filesystems
>> on an IDE disc?
>>
>> Specifically, on one of my development systems I can see a node
>> /pci/pci-ide at 1f,1/ide at 0/disk at 0, but what comes next?

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]



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