Yaboot to boot Mac OS X on PCI/Firewire drive ?

alex.nishri at utoronto.ca alex.nishri at utoronto.ca
Mon Jan 1 16:31:59 EST 2007


Can Yaboot be used to boot into Mac OS X, from a disk connected via a
a PCI/Firewire card ?

I have a BW G3. The original motherboard Firewire is toast.
Instead I use a Creative I/O IEEE 1394a PCI Card for Firewire 400.
Using this card, via Firewire, I access an external disk on which
I have installed Mac OS 10.3.

Using Mac OS X 10.3, booted from the internal IDE card, I set
the "startup" disk to be the Firewire disk with Mac OS 10.3 installed.
The resulting NVRam Open Firmware boot-device variable is set to 
bridge/pci1106,3044 at 4/node at 50770e0bf5da3b/sbp-2 at 4000/@0:10,\\:tbxi

But the BW G3's Open Firmware 3.1.1 won't boot from the Firewire disk. 
During the boot process, the screen shows a folder with a question mark,
and after a pause, the system on the internal IDE disk boots (instead of 
the PCI/Firewire connected external disk.) My guess is that Open Firmware
has support to boot via the motherboard Firewire chip (which is toast on
this machine), but not via PCI/Firewire.

My question: if I boot from Open Firmware into Yaboot, can it, in turn, 
boot my Mac OS X 10.3 from the PCI/Firewire connected disk ?

Thanks.



More information about the Yaboot-users mailing list