apple open firmware vs sun open firmware and booting

[lethe]

sun s open firmware is very similiar to apple s. one nice thing that you can do from the firmware prompt in sun is choose your boot device very easily. you can simply type something like 'boot cdrom' 'boot net' or 'boot disk2'. those names are just aliases, so you can also specify the boot device with the hardware address pathname.

can the same thing be done with apple s open firmware? i have been unable to get it to work. i guess it s not imperative since with apple you can hold down the option key to list your choices and with sun you can t, but it sure would be convenient. has anyone done this?

thanks

[LordOphidian]

Im not sure how exactly you do it but I know you can atleast do the 'boot net' and 'boot cdrom' options. Or atleast you can do the cdrom one on my biege g3.

As for the "boot disk" I think you have to do something like "boot /pci@xxx/path/to/disk/ bootfile" but I am not sure. It has been a very long time since I played in OF.

[lethe]

ok, i ve figured out what i was doing wrong. the boot command is this

boot bootdisk:bootpartition,bootfile

so if you devalias, you can see what the boot devices are, but you have to enter a partition and bootfile too or else it will fail to boot.

here are some valid commands that i have used:

boot hd:9,\\:tbxi
boot cd:8,\\:tbxi
boot mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/@0:10,\\:tbxi

you get the idea. it s not quite as easy as sun s , but easy enough. you could set an alias to those commands, and then just type boot-osx or boot-os9 or boot-darwin. it should work fine.

[tops20_man]

I'm familiar with Sun's firmware,
but haven't been able to find any
documentation for Apples Open
Firmware. Is it documented
anywhere?

Thanks,
Mike