Hi guys,
I've played a little with those "Moana" files and managed to boot AOS4 with them. It was quite a pain in the ass but let’s start from the beginning: (Note: Not for Lamers !!!)
You definitely need one of the last Mac mini model with 1,5GHz with 64MB GFX memory or AOS4 won't kick. Blame the developer of Kickstart/ATIRadeon.chip for this limitation. The next hurdle is the loader L/slb (also L/slb_v2_mm) itself, it's a piece of hardcoded crap which refuses to load the Kickstart modules from anything else than the device cd:.
Type "setenv boota-device cd:" at the open firmware (OF) prompt. You only need to type this once as the environment variables will be automatically saved in the NVRAM forever. You can check it with "printenv" at OF. Man, I've spent hours trying to boot Moana from hd:, ud: USB-Stick and 2nd USB-DVD drive. No chance, so don't lose time trying that.
Next, boot Moana CD with "boot cd:\l\slb" or "boot cd:\\slb". SLB will load the config file Kickstart/Kicklayout and show its entries 1-6. Only entry 5 will load the right modules for ATA, USB and ATIgfx. By selecting 5 the loader will load all the modules defined in Kicklayout into memory. You may need to press ENTER several times until the console prints something like starting ExecSG.
Now it's the point of no return. If you press ENTER the screen goes black and after a while the AOS4 Boingball boot screen will appear. Or if you press ENTER and quickly press and hold left+right mouse botton, you will enter the early startup menu. YEAY!!! ...but, the only boot device available in AOS4 is CD0:, no external DVD drive or USB-Stick is accepted. Dammit!!! How do I eject the CD to replace it with the AOS4 CD? Long story short, I couldn't find an easy way. At OF prompt you can enter "eject cd:" but you can't do that after slb loaded all the modules.
To check if Moana really works, I replaced Mac mini internal drive with one with eject button and started over again. After inserting the AOS4 CD it will boot into workbench and automatically load an installer. Fine so Moana really works, but I want to use my Mac mini as is and not opened with a crappy DVD drive attached on it.
It would be cool to boot from HD and to have the DVD drive free for the AOS4 CD, wouldn't it? But as I told you before this is not possible, right?
WRONG!!!...sort of :-)
It's enough to make slb believe it's booting from a CD drive. And how we do that? I won't tell you!
....bah, just kidding. :-D Here is the solution. First copy the directories Devs, Kickstart, L and Libs from the Moana CD to the root of your MacOS hard disk, ignore the other files in the root of the CD.
Eject the CD, go back to OF and enter “devalias”. This will print all devices from your Mac mini. Locate the entries hd: and cd:. Now make cd: to look like hd: with “devalias cd /pci@f4000000/ata-6@d/disk0” (your Mac mini setup it may differ from mine so change appropriately). Now boot Kickstart with “boot hd:\L\slb” and voila, with some luck you end up in AOS4. Unfortunately this method seems to fail often to load the USB stack. Not the best solutions but hey, it works. The SLB loader is really crap when not booting from a real CD.
So let’s do a combined Moana and AOS4 CD: OK, it’s getting late and I really don’t want to describe it step by step, but here some important infos: You will need to extract the ELF boot loader from the AOS4 CD boot block. Burn it as El Torrito and no floppy or hard disk emulation. The CD itself should be ISO+Rock Ridge no {bleep}ty ISO+Joliet or HFS.
That’s all folks.
