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List:       openbsd-ppc
Subject:    Re: Installing openbsd on emac without disk drive?
From:       "Ryan S. Northrup" <northrup () yellowapple ! us>
Date:       2018-09-30 22:36:17
Message-ID: BD194260-5FED-4249-A0B6-1BB327FC4A88 () yellowapple ! us
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Hi Lucas,

On September 26, 2018 2:46:43 AM PDT, Lucas <ostrogothica@airmail.cc> wrote:
> I recently got my hands on a 1.42GHZ Emac with a faulty disk drive, is
> it possible to use a usb or firewire external disk drive to install
> OpenBSD and if not is there another way to install OpenBSD on my Emac?
> 
> Thanks.

If I remember right, USB worked fine on my eMac.  It's apparently hit or miss, but if \
you have a newer eMac (I think the 1.42GHz counts as "newer" here) you should be \
fine.  I don't remember needing to do anything *too* fancy on the OFW prompt, though \
(just a matter of finding the device; \
http://www.mediacaster.nl/usb_boot_imac_powerpc_g5.html is a good set of \
instructions, though you'll obviously need to boot bsd.rd instead of BootX ;) ).

FireWire should work without issue; I don't know how well OpenBSD *specifically* \
works with it (I don't have any FireWire drives on hand to test), but Macs themselves \
specifically support(ed) it (Firewire is to pre-Thunderbolt Macs as USB is to Wintel \
PCs in terms of native platform support / integration).

On that note, if you have another PC (e.g. another Mac) with a working FireWire port, \
it should be possible to put the eMac in Target Disk Mode, plug it into your other \
PC, and copy bsd.rd + the install files to your eMac (and boot bsd.rd via the OFW \
prompt).  This will work regardless of whether or not the eMac still has OS X \
installed at all, let alone in working condition.

Best of luck!
-- 
Ryan S. Northrup (RyNo)
northrup@yellowapple.us


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