Greetings.
I'm trying to install the released OpenBSD 5.4 onto a old-ish netbook
without an optical drive. I thought I could do this via
install54.iso; I can see where I need to get to, and can almost get
there, but I can't find the last step.
I suspect this needs only a 1- or 2-line answer.
Target machine (not ideal, admittedly):
* Acer Aspire One ZG8 ('no, don't throw it out, I'll try OpenBSD on it!') [1]
* ...so i386
* Internal disk
* No optical drive, but two USB ports and an SD slot
* Previously had Windows on it *shudder*
* No dmesg, I'm afraid, since part of my problem is an inability to
mount any storage.
I can boot the machine with the floppy.fs image (dd'ed to a flash
drive), and go through the configuration, accepting defaults, and
whole-disk partitioning the internal disk, to the point where I select
the full installation media. This I can't do.
Problem 0 is that the boot fails to detect networking hardware. I
understand that the wireless interface doesn't work on this machine
with OpenBSD, but that the wired one should work [2]. However the
wired interface _isn't_ detected, and the installation script goes
straight from 'System hostname?' to 'DNS domain name?' even though
it's plugged in to an ethernet network which is offering DHCP
services. I can't see anything in the dmesg that's relevant (no 'fxp'
or 'vlan'). I'm reasonably confident the network is behaving as it
should, but it's _possible_, though unlikely, that the wired interface
is simply broken (the machine's previous owner only ever used it
wireless). But there's not much to go on, and I'm uncertain how to
debug this further.
But it's OK!: I can install it from install54.iso, also dd'ed to a
flash drive. (the machine's intended for offline use, so 'never
connected to the internet' would be a somewhat desirable property).
And this is where I'm stuck.
The install54.iso isn't bootable in this context, but all I need to do
is to boot the machine using floppy.fs, then mount the install54 flash
drive, and give that as the 'disks' target.
But (plan A) if I select 'disks' as the location of the sets, the
only device that comes up is the internal hard disk, and this is true
whether I have the install54 flash drive plugged in to the second USB
port, alongside the floppy.fs drive on a USB expander, or burned to an
SD card. Again, nothing obviously relevant in dmesg -- I can see the
wd0 device being detected, but no obvious 'USB failure'. The USB port/bus
works, since that's where the bootable floppy.fs is sitting.
OK, Plan B. The second-stage boot is detecting three devices (namely
internal hard disk, plus the floppy.fs drive and the install54 drive):
'hd0', 'hd1', 'hd2'. So I try booting directly from there:
boot> b hd0:/5.4/i386/bsd
(and so on through hd{0,1,2}{,a,c}:, with and without the leading
slash, ..., -- I'm getting a bit desperate here), but I get 'no such
file or directory' or 'invalid argument'. Looking at 'm diskinfo'
tells me that there are three devices there (which is what I expect),
but not much more.
I'm vague about the details, but I have a reasonably secure schematic
understanding of the boot process, which doesn't conflict with what I
read in [3]. I'd be interested to know what I'm missing or
misunderstanding.
Plan C: create a custom installer (eg [4, 5]). That appears to depend
on having a working OpenBSD system, to call /usr/mdec/installboot.
But I don't -- the other OSs I have to hand are OS X and FreeBSD.
Plan d (not worth a capital letter): it looks like I could try copying
/bsd from /5.4/i386/bsd to the top of that filesystem and... see what
happens, but (a) I run into filesystem support limitations on OS X,
and (b) even if I dealt with that, I'd still have to make the modified
filesystem bootable. bless(8) [6] is the broad analogue of
installboot on OS X, but I suspect it's specific to both HFS+ and to
Apple's BIOS, so this seems unlikely to work. Even then, 'flailing
around blindly' is never a good problem solving strategy.
Plan e: I could try booting the Mac with the floppy.fs, doing an
OpenBSD install onto another flash drive, making _that_ bootable,
and... no. On my main work machine, that could go very wrong very
quickly (!), and I'm not even going to go there unless I'm very
confident I know what I'm doing.
So there I am. Plans A and B seem tantalisingly close to a solution,
but missing a final step. Writing out the email hasn't produced an
'aha!'; a fair amount of googling suggests I'm not missing anything
terribly obvious (somewhat surprisingly: this is a slightly odd
configuration I'm attempting, but not insanely exotic); the
misc@openbsd.org list doesn't appear to be searchable (right?). So I
seem to have exhausted the DIY possibilities. Therefore...
Dear list: What is the one line I'm missing?
Thanks for any pointers.
Norman
[1] http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB102059&cv=820
[2] http://www.darwinsys.com/openbsd/laptops.html
[3] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#Boot386
[4] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140225072408
[5] http://blog.breeno.net/2014/02/creating-flexible-openbsd-usb-installer.html
[6]
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man8/bless.8.html
--
Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
