Re: Performing installer tests on PowerMac with USB sticks
On 30/04/2019 23:59, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Both usb0 and usb1 show an empty list for me on my iBook G4. usb2 lists
> the internal keyboard and mouse. So it seems that this particular model
> doesn't support USB disks unless I am missing something.
I actually managed to install on my G4 Mac Mini using your Debian 10 NETINST CD
images with a little of hackery and a USB stick because I didn't have any blank CDs
around at the time.
1) I did a "dd if=path/to/cd.iso of=/dev/sdc" or similar to copy your CD image onto
the USB stick
2) Plug the USB stick into your Mac and boot into OpenFirmware by holding down the
relevant keys when you hear the chime (CTRL-Apple-shift-O-F?)
3) Run "show-devs" to dump the entire device tree
4) In the device tree I could see the USB disk appear under /pci somewhere - it's
easy to spot because it's a leaf node of "disk" which is doesn't match the "hd" and
"cd" aliases which you can display using "devalias"
5) Next the hack: this was important for yaboot which had hardcoded references to the
"cd" alias in its configuration. All I did was point the "cd" alias to the USB disk
node above using the path discovered in 4) like this:
"devalias cd /pci@f20000/.../disk"
Note that this change is not persistent unless you explicitly write it to nvram so no
need to worry about trashing your Mac's boot configuration.
6) Now execute the standard boot command: "boot cd:,\\:tbxi" and off you go :)
As reported elsewhere in this thread boot from USB stick is slower than may be
expected, but I was able to do a complete install from your ports images this way.
ATB,
Mark.
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