Chris's Completely Unofficial NetBSD/Amiga Page

(My experiences with NetBSD/Amiga 1.3 are limited to my A1200 with phase5 Blizzard '060 and SCSI-Kit IV, but you might find them useful...)

Hard Disk Preparation

When I first set up hard disk partitions for NetBSD/amiga 1.3 according to the instructions, I found that I couldn't boot directly from the root or swap partitions (using the Early Startup Menu). Changing the settings for the swap and root partitions using HDToolBox as follows seemed to fix this:

Number of beginning reserved blocks: 2
Automount: on
Bootable: on
Filesystem: Custom File System
Custom boot code: ??
Custom boot blocks: ??

BlizKick

If you're attempting to boot NetBSD (or Linux for that matter) on an Amiga with a Blizzard card and you use BlizKick from PitPlane Productions, you may find that the kernel has problems talking to SCSI devices and won't boot (it did on my machine initially, anyway).

I assume the problem is the result of soft-kicking the SCSI ROM; if you don't use the SoftSCSI module, you may well have no problems. Anyway, BlizKick is too useful to remove, so I just altered S:startup-sequence something like the following:

C:mbpress
if $RC EQ 1
C:BlizKick * QUIET LOCALFAST SPEEDROM HOGWAITBLIT EXTRESBUF=22908 Devs:Modules/Colour MODULE Devs:Modules/SoftSCSI Devs:Modules/RemCards Devs:Modules/PrepareEmul Devs:Modules/NewAlert Devs:Modules/BBlank Devs:Modules/SpeedyIDE Devs:Modules/NoClick
else

so that the Amiga boots without running BlizKick unless you hold down the left mouse button during the first few seconds of booting.

I forget where mbpress came from, but I'm sure you can get it from Aminet.

If you've already run BlizKick you'll need to cold-boot to get rid of it.

Questions, comments or complaints? Send me an e-mail!
(E-mail address munged for anti-spam effect; just delete the ".nospam")

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