Re: Installing Woody on a Mac IIci without floppy and Mac Os possible?
On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 11:18:40PM +0200, ma_pri_2004 wrote:
> The Goal: to install debian woody on a mac IIci
> - without a floppy (it?s broken, so no boot floppies can be used)
> - with a blank hard disc (no mac os)
These two together make it difficult. If you can't boot something, it's
not very useful. If you have another mac available, it might be easiest
to swap around the hard drives.
> - with a graphic card (with vga adapter) which might or might not work
> with linux. I don?t have a mac monitor and the onboard graphic card
> shows no picture on my pc monitor when using the vga adapter there, but
> the graphic card gives a picture.
> - with a nic that should work with woody
>
> If it is not necessary I don?t want to install mac os (as done in
> http://mfdh.ca/apple/debian_on_oldworld_mac.html).
Take a look at http://emile.sourceforge.net/index.php for the possibility
of loading linux without the macos. It's still experimental, I believe.
It may also require a working floppy drive.
> I have two SCSI-I-CD-ROMs here, but if I understand right, the IIci can
> not boot from a CD-ROM. Is this correct (Want to know this before
> getting the woody cds, because I have only ISDN here)?
It should be able to boot from CD-ROM, but it depends. Apple deliberately
didn't support non-Apple branded drives, among other things. So if the
drive isn't Apple, it most likely won't be supported at boot time, and
you need to load a driver to see it once you've booted the macos. The
regular driver shipped by Apple rejects anything not in an explicit list
even though it actually works fine with most SCSI CD-ROM drives. There
is a hack to break the detection and make it try to recognize other drives.
> My idea is using another computer to access the mac hard disc and make
> it for the mac bootable. It seems to me that mac-fdisk and pmac-fdisk
> could do this, but these are not available on my pc running i368 woody
> and windows. Are there alternatives?
It may seem strange, but mac-fdisk can't format a mac disk enough for
the macos to actually be able to use it. It is only useful for modifying
an existing partition map unless you are using a newworld style powermac,
which obviously excludes any 68k based hardware.
> In Debian Manual is written (A.2.4. Booting from hard disk)
> "It's possible to boot the installer using no removable media, but just
> an existing hard disk, which can have a different OS on it. Download
> hd-media/initrd.gz, hd-media/vmlinuz, and a Debian CD image to the
> top-level directory of the hard disk. Make sure that the CD image has a
> filename ending in ".iso". Now it's just a matter of booting linux with
> the initrd."
> Being a linux novice, I don?t know Where to download hd-media/initrd.gz
> and hd-media/vmlinuz. Is here Mac Os necessary? Is there somebody who
> could describe or outline this?
With the mac, you would normally boot using the Penguin application from
the macos. It is a full mac application, and you tell it what files to
load for the kernel and ramdisk in it's config dialogs. If you're looking
in the Debian repository, take a look here:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-m68k/3.0.23-2002-05-21/mac/
In particular: Penguin-19.hqx, linux.bin, and root.bin would be the
bootloader, kernel, and ramdisk for the woody installer.
> I know it sounds a bit like "can it be done?", but would really love to
> use this mac as a small web server.
Yes, it can be done, but it might be painful.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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