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Re: Installing Woody on a Mac IIci without floppy and Mac Os possible?



On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, Christian T. Steigies wrote:

> Moin,
> 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 (itīs broken, so no boot floppies can be used)
> > - with a blank hard disc (no mac os)
> > - with a graphic card (with vga adapter) which might or might not work
> > with linux. I donīt 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.

If you remove the nubus card, the main screen should revert to internal
video, and the desktop with it. You don't have to do this, you can use the
monitors control panel to switch the main screen after you get mac os to
boot. But there's little point leaving the video card in if you are going
to run linux on it.

> > - with a nic that should work with woody
>
> I don't know about the maxiici, but, with little differences, I did this
> with my Q840AV. I never had a mac before that, so I needed several tries.
> I wanted to document this a little on this page, but so far I only have the
> success messages:
> http://people.debian.org/~cts/Q840AV/
>
> > If it is not necessary I donīt want to install mac os (as done in
> > http://mfdh.ca/apple/debian_on_oldworld_mac.html).
>
> That's for powerpc, I don't think that will help you much. AFAIK for m68k
> macs, you need MacOS. There where some rumors a couple of months ago about a
> sf(?) project where you did not need MacOS, but I don't remember to many
> success stories about that.

There have been some reports of success booting Emile on some models. I
don't recall which ones. As Brad says, it requires a working floppy drive.
But these can be readily obtained (ebay etc).

> > 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)?

My IIci can certainly boot from CDROM. It is unlike most other macs, in
that holding down "c" doesn't do it, but you can make it boot from CD by
holding down <cmd>-<opt>-<shift>-<delete>.

As Brad says, your best chance is with an Apple CD-ROM drive, though I use
a Hewlett Packard (Toshiba) one. It boots, but doesn't show up on the
desktop unless it is the boot device. There are some CDROM drivers here,

http://host59.ipowerweb.com/~macdrive/disk.shtml

> Even if it can boot from CD-Rom, it wont help you much, since the Debian CDs
> do not contain MacOS. I did not get a Mac CD-Rom with my Mac, and I could
> not make it read from a non-Mac SCSI CD-Rom drive... but I do have a working
> floppy drive, and I used it quite a bit until I got everything installed.
>
> > 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?

The debian installer permits you to repartition, so you won't need
mac-fdisk running on a foriegn machine (though I do have a linux x86 build
of mac-fdisk if you need one).

> I downloaded the free MacOS (7.5.3 with upgrades to 7.5.5 IIRC) from apple.
> I also downloaded one floppy which contains a minimal MacOS (6.x?). Somehow
> I managed to create bootable floppies with this (probably from the MacOS
> that was still on the huge 400MB Mac harddisk that came with it). Since I
> wanted a slightly larger disk, I had to put a patched Mac partitioning tool
> on that floppy, this link came up somewhere:
> http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/patch.html

Just for clarification, the patch for Apple's HD SC Setup partitioning
tool is necessary for most drives that weren't shipped by apple. You may
not need it, try the one on the installer media first, because if that
works it will save you a lot of trouble.

> I guess with this I formatted the large harddisk (for some reason the Mac
> only runs stable with one disk connected, so I had to boot from floppy to
> format the big disk).
>
> Then I copied the 15 or 100 parts of MacOS 7.5 onto the new disk, and
> started the installation. Or maybe not... MacOS has the habbit of
> trashing its system disk, so it does not boot from harddisk anymore.
>
> For this you want to keep a bootable floppy around, which will more or
> less automagically fix your harddisk when you boot from floppy.

Since the system files weren't actually corrupted, this sounds like driver
or termination problems...

> I think I got tired of this and just hooked up the SCSI disk to my PC,
> ran Basilisk there, partitioned the disk. I definetely copied the MacOS
> install disks via the emulator, since that was a lot faster than using
> floppies. Anyhow, after I got the disk partioned and MacOS installed, I
> booted the woody installer from a handful of debian files that I also
> copied to the mac partition. Everything after that was a piece of cake,
> small problem with making the NIC go, but then I just downloaded
> additional stuff from the net, and the Mac is happily running Debian
> ever after...

That's interesting. I didn't know Basilisk could talk directly to SCSI
devices. Did you just use the character device as a disk image?

> > Is it possible by formatting the disc using hfs file system and putting
> > a bootable debian or mac os on it? If yes, how?
> >
> > 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 donīt 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?

As far as I can tell, yes, mac os is still necessary.

> This sounds like the sarge installer, and not like the woody installer? It
> would be good if you tested the sarge installer, it is so much nicer. But I
> haven't tested it on a Mac yet...
>
> If you want to try sarge, please use Stephen's daily builds, I assume they
> are more up to date than the cdimage, or at least identical.
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2004/03/msg00009.html
> http://people.debian.org/~smarenka/d-i/images-m68k/daily/
>
> Hmm, things have changed a little bit since I last tried it. I used nativehd
> where you copy a hand full of files to your MacOS partition, like in woody.
> Maybe you have to get a cdimage and grab files from there. I do not see
> Penguin or a mac kernel, a mac boot/root disk on Stephen's site...
>
> But I guess you wil be busy for a while to get MacOS running. If you finish
> that faster than Penguin appearing in the sarge installer, get the woody
> macinstall.tar.gz, unpack it on your mac partition, and start the Penguin
> from there.
>
> Christian
>

So, to summarise the thread, your options include the following,

- get a mac 1.4 MB floppy drive ("superdrive") and try emile (probably
requires a linux box to write the floppy).

- get a mac 1.4 MB floppy drive and a macos boot floppy and install macos
(probably requires a mac to write the floppies from apple's disk images).

- boot from a system 7.x CD and install macos. This is possibly the
easiest way.

- if you have a PC with SCSI, download the 7.5.3 images from apple and use
Basilisk to install mac os (though, getting basilisk to boot macos
requires a ROM Image, and a boot disk image...)

-F



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