Help with Big Endian BFS greater then 60gb

Be, Inc.
1

As the subject says…

Am looking for a way to initialize a drive(s) in Big Endian BFS (ala PPC) greater then 60gb.

I’m restoring an old mac and adding in some newer hardware, namely some 120gb PATA drives. All is well if I just split the drive into 2 partitions and ~58gb each, however I would like one big partition.

Under x86, using mkbfs off a leaked dan0 build was possible. I’ve seen so-callled screenshots of a PPC dan0 build, but I don’t know if those truly existed in real.

So… is there any way to do this?

2

Not as far as I know, the leaked Dano seems to be X86 only, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS_R5.1d0

Did Haiku ever run on PPC systems?

3

Also have a look at https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/could_haiku_someday_run_bebox

4

I think, you can try remove hdd and initialize partition on another machine (x86) with Haiku or updated BeOS.

5

Some Googling shows some “supposed” screenshots of dan0 PPC. Sadly, nothing has ever been verified.

I’m gonna try one of the builds here:

http://www.haiku-files.org/unsupported-builds/ppc/

Hopefully there’s a usable mkbfs binary inside the image. I’ll report back if there’s any success (or lack thereof).

6

Thanks, but x86 will produce a BFS partition that’s in little endian byte order. It’ll be incompatible with PPC builds of BeOS.

7

I’d be interested in hearing, got a Power Computing clone Macintosh here with BeOS R5.0.3 on it. But it uses SCSI drives so I’m not likely to upgrade its 2GB hard drive to something larger, but just in case…

8

You might want to check this page out… PowerPC - Unsupported Builds | Haiku Files

9

Those PPC disc images are about 800KB, just enough for a boot loader but not Haiku.

10

Haiku never booted to the desktop or even a bash shell on PPC. The best you could get, in the days where it was somewhat working, was the boot screen with some icons light up. Then it failed because there was no PCI bus support.

At the moment I think it is not even possible to build a complete image anymore. mmu_man is slowly refactoring things to add support for more devices (the initial target was the original Mac Mini, but now most activity is on the Sam960 IIRC).

What you could try, however, is taking mkbfs sources from Haiku and compiling them on a PPC BeOS system (it may need some backporting).

11

TLDL: r42762 didn’t work

I tried the Haiku PPC r42762 raw image. The BFS image itself was little endian and required mounting on an x86 system. I then zipped up the contents and transferred it to my Mac clone running R5.0.3. Every executable refused to run due to what I am assuming as a difference in endianness on the binaries.

Compiling the mkbfs sources from Haiku on a PPC might work with a long shot. Will never know until I, or someone else, tries to do it.