I’ve had quite a problem getting Darwin 8.0.1 to boot on my B&W – holding down the C key doesn’t work, and so that is pretty much it as there are no other instructions… Now I have been messing around with the OpenFirmware settings quite a bit so may have stuffed up some invisible extra, but that’s because I feel comfortable with Sun’s OpenBoot (and so have half a clue and am more therefore more dangerous to myself) and like to tell the firmware what I think of it. Regularly.

Having a spare Mac to hand helps here, as coming from a non-Mac background the whole bless thing is alien to me, but running bless -info on the Darwin CD was very helpful indeed: you can force the boot to take place from the ok prompt with:

boot cd:,\System\Library\CoreServices\BootX

There. That was obvious, wasn’t it ? Still, given that this is Darwin and not OpenDarwin things get complex after this point, but that’s the fun of messing around with it.

I’ve had a little issue trying to get more than 4GB of data onto this unit, and the usual Google wasn’t helping much. Checking all of the jumpers showed that hardware compression was enabled, but both tar and dump refused to go beyond 4GB of data, which was rather annoying as my root partition is only 4.5GB…

After running mt status I saw that the density was set to 19 which in the man page for mt maps to DDS, and not DDS2, so I then tried mt setdensity 36 but that failed with the rather annoying:

mt: /dev/nrst0: setdensity: Invalid argument

which is rather unhelpful, especially as I know it’s a DDS2 drive. Looking through the source code wasn’t that helpful: it just ended up as a SCSI command anyway, so I triple-checked the jumper setting (J4, D.C. Disable is OFF) and changed the Unix DIP switches from the Solaris settings (1=OFF, 2=ON, 3=OFF, 4=ON) to the Linux ones (all OFF). I’m not sure if that last stage is important as at this point I re-re-read the mt man page again and saw that density zero is listed as:

     0       Device default

So I then tried the following commands after inserting a fresh tape:

mt rewind
mt setdensity 0
mt eew 1
dump -0aet /

and 1 hour and 1 minute later I had my dump. Hurrah !

BBC – Radio 4 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Play the adventure online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_new.shtml

Oh dear – this could be the biggest waste of my time in quite a while (and makes me glad I no longer pay by the minute for my connection), but it does satisfy one of my mild musings about my game playing ability and 80′s computer adventures: I’m totally rubbish at them, and they are harder than lots of todays games. Here I was thinking I was getting ready for Tartan Slippers, and all the time it’s simply because the original writers were of that annoying breed of people who consider The Times’ crossword puzzle a mild distraction whilst waiting for the kettle to boil first thing on the morning.

Before they’ve had a coffee.

Or in this case, a nice cup of tea.

For the record, I can’t do crossword puzzles.

Or make a decent cup of tea.

This is a bug in Apple’s Disk Utility – it will totally choke on my G3 B&W when presented with a drive that has had a NetBSD/macppc disc label applied (ok, incorrectly applied with disklabel and not pdisk, but that’s not the point !). Once logged in the system notices that there is a drive present that is not readable, and prompts to Initialize…, Ignore or Eject. Choosing Initialize… launches Disk Utility, which then crashes saying that a program that it needs to run hasn’t started, and that you should click Quit. The app is 100% unresponsive however, and must be killed by Force Quit. Using Console shows that the DiskManagementTool fails to start, and this brings down Disk Utilty, but it can be worked around using the command line.

Assuming you are booting from /dev/disk0 and the NetBSD drive is /dev/disk1, type the following:

sudo pdisk /dev/disk1 -initialize

and the system will then notice that an uninitialised volume has been inserted and prompt as before, but this time Disk Utility will launch without a problem.

If you want to discover which disc is the correct one, type:

sudo pdisk /dev/disk0 -dump

and then:

sudo pdisk /dev/disk1 -dump

and so on. Correctly functioning drives will display a few lines of sensible values – the broken one will scroll for a very long time reporting:

16608: @ 0 for 0, type: 0x0
16609: @ 0 for 0, type: 0x0
16610: @ 0 for 0, type: 0x0

and so on (it probably starts at zero, but vanished off my screen before I hit CTRL+C).