On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 2:12 AM Bob McGowan <ramjr0915@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I have a B&W G3 which I have upgraded to 1G RAM. It also has an Adaptec
SCSI controller I added to use with a 32G LVD SCSI disk. It also has
the original SCSI 9G SCSI disk on which I've been able to install OSX
10.4.2, initially.
It has since upgraded to 10.4.11, if that is useful to know.
I have booted both Ubuntu and Debian Linux from CD and installed both,
at different times, on the 32G disk. Currently I have Ubuntu 14.4
installed.
The problem is that the Adaptec controller is not recognized by
OpenFirmware and so the system cannot boot directly to it.
I was working with NetBSD 9 for a while and with the proper setup, I
could load the kernel from the known 9G disk and have it set root to the
second drive.
I would like to do the same or similar with Linux but have so far not
been able to figure out how to do this.
I have probably copied more to the 9G disk than really needed but even
so, it fails. I have recreated the contents of /boot on the OSX disk,
including symlinks. I start from OF with the command:
boot /pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/scsi@4/@0:6,/yaboot
This generates an error about invalid partition type and a boot prompt.
I then try, at yaboot's boot prompt:
/pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/scsi@4/@0:6,/boot/vmlinux root=/dev/sda3
The kernel prints a bunch of normal type lines, then panics because it
can't find the root device. It also reports a list of partitions it can
find. The only disks are the ram disk (partitions 0-15) and sr0.
This looks like it is missing drivers for the SCSI cards, but the CD
kernel had no problems and I thought the kernel placed on sda3 would
have them also. That kernel is what I copied to the 9G disk.
Any suggestions on how to do this correctly?
In case you have not seen the pages, here's Debian's page on
PowerMacs: https://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/inst/pmac.
There may be some firmware available, but I don't know how to load it
during installation with one of the current ISOs. I ran into that
trouble last week. Also see https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware and
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/archive/.
Jeff