[Debootloaders-miboot] install power mac 6500

[Piotras]

Hi Rob,

Good to hear that you managed to boot the kernel:-)

I did a quick look at the beta3 floppies, and net-drivers.img has the size
of 1507328 bytes. It seems that it shouldn't fit on the floppy, but then
you mentioned that the installer managed to get additional modules.

Possibly you could try to access the shell (alt-F2?) and check if the driver
is loaded into kernel ("lsmod", or "more /proc/modules"). You can try to
manually load the driver with insmod FILE_NAME_WITH_PATH and then
manually configure networking with ifconfig before continuing with the
installation.

Unfortunately I don't have much experience with the new Debian installer,
so I'm not even sure if all the mentioned commands are available.

For my machine (PowerBook G3 Series - Wallstreet) I created a bootable
image with sarge installer on a CompactFlash (my PowerBook can boot
from CompactFlash via PCMCIA). The image has miboot, kernels and
initrds on the first partition (HFS) and the dump of netinst sarge installer
(iso9660) on the second partition. To access the installer I have to
manually specify location of the installer image, but otherwise it works
very good.

I didn't try to use this method for CDROM and I don't know if it can work
without the Apple_Driver partition.

The PowerBook has couple of bugs in OpenFirmware that prevented it
from booting quick from HDD and booting netbsd from CompactFlash
(I tested an old version of netbds). I have some workarounds but it's
a different story.


Regards,

Piotr

On 9/9/06, rob rob <stinkysnooky at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi piotr,
> thanks for your post, or rather email. well I tried what you told me, but
> got some unexpected results.
> I got the boot.img from:
>
> http://people.debian.org/~wouter/d-i/powerpc-miboot/beta3/powerpc/floppy/
>
> I wrote the disks as you said, and that works. apon checking them they gave
> me the same message as while writing them, namely:
>
> 1440+0 records in
> 1440+0 records out
> Segmentation fault
>
> Then i booted from the floppies, the option, on my german keyboard alt gr
> showed the debug, but I didn't need it, since I got to the installation
> menu. I got the negative penguin once again and after a few seconds the
> kernel started booting. I had to remove the disk with a pin to get the
> root.img disk in, which i also wrote with your method. Installation started
> alright, there are two rather wonky lines running through the picture. I
> wrote the net-driver.img disk also, and put it in when asked if I wanted to
> load more drivers. It loaded a whole bunch of drivers.
> Anyway, I had problems with the network hardware recognition. I have a pci
> rtl839c network card, but it wasn't detected. When asked to choose which
> card I  had, i chose that one , but it didn't make a difference. I couldn't
> go on with the installation so I quit it.
>
> here are my last relavent debug outputs which i get from alt F4
>
> net/hw-detect.hotplug Detect hotpluggable network interface lo
>
> ethdetect: FATAL: Could not load
> /lib/modules/2.6.16-2-powerpc-miboot/modules.dep : No such file or directory
>
> INFO: Menu item 'netcfg' succeeded but requested to be left unconfigered
>
> By the way, what do you boot with if not the floppies?
> It would be great if you could help me further.
> Rob
>
>
>
> Hi Rob,
>
> Based on your description, miboot started successfully, but wasn't
> able to find or load some of its own components or the Linux kernel.
>
> I haven't been using floppies for years, but remember that these
> can cause lots of problems (especially on PCs).
>
> First you should make sure that the floppy was written correctly.
> For myself I've never used "conv=sync". Please try:
> dd if=boot-floppy-hfs.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024; sync
>
> To verify you should REMOVE the floppy from the drive (this it to
> make sure that the cache is flushed). Then re-insert it and read it
> with:
> dd if=/dev/fd0 of=my_floppy.img bs=1024
> If the produced file is different the original, try different floppy.
>
> If the floppy was written correctly, you should try to enable debug
> output by pressing the Option key (usually it's located between
> the Command (Apple) and Control keys) when miboot starts.
> Timing may be important.
>
> If you cannot get debug output I can build a floppy image with
> debug option enabled permanently for you to try.
>
> I will not be able to help you if you don't provide the debug output.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Piotr