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Re: booting debian on a powerbook g3 wallstreet after first installation

Chris Tillman wrote:


On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 01:42:16PM +0100, tarak wrote:

hello all,

maybe one of you knows what to do about the boot problem
after the first installation of debian stable powerpc.

i have a powerbook g3 wallstreet with 250 MHz CPU and 192 MB
RAM. it's an oldworld system with an 2.0.1 firmware.

installation works fine. i boot the boot-floppy-hfs.img
which asks for the root-floppy. after having loaded this
one dbootstrap starts and i can do everything as usual.
set up the network and download packages. fdisk my harddrive.
i have reinitialized my partition table and created one
linux partition(3.75GB) and a swap partition(350MB) at the end
of the disk. finally i make the system bootable, using quik to
do this, and reboot.

nothing happens... black screen.

i have looked for a description of this problem in the net
but only found somebody's answer to a mailing-list-post
saying that the out- and input-devices would be set to the
serial port. i checked that but found the settings correct
i think. the were set to "screen" and "kbd".

i think the problem is that the firmware doesn't know
what to boot. i have resetted the firmware and after
that the grey screen with a floppy and a blinking ?-sign
appears. apple says that this meens that the system doesn't
know what to boot, not finding the default macos.


does anyone know what to do about this?

i think there are two possibilities:

- booting from a patched floppy. embarrasing...
 i would also have to keep two copies of the
 kernels i build afterwards, one on the floppy.


That's a possibility.


- hacking the firmware settings for boot-device
 and bootfile... tried this but was rather un-
 successfull...


You may need to do more of this too.

You need to obtain the patched version of quik that runs on G3's,
there's a link and instructions in section 8.1 of the online
installation manual (www.debian.org/releases/stable/install).

BootX works reliably on G3s, but since you wiped out MacOS
you can't use it.

done that... screen still stays black.

here's a little list of what i did:
- rebooted with the installation disks
- chrooted to /target
- mounted proc-filesystem
- brought up network with ifup
- downloaded the patched first.b-file for g3's as linked on section 8.1 in the 
 installation manual with wget
- backuped the old one and placed the new one to its apropriate place
- run quik -v at the shell
- got back to dbootstrap and made system bootable
- got back to the chroot-shell to change nvsetenv-settings to:
 boot-device /pci/mac-io/ata0/ata-disk@0:2
 (my root device is indicated as /dev/hda2 by dbootstrap)
 boot-file "/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19-powerpc root=/dev/hda2"
- rebooted using dbootstrap
i wonder if i must append something as kernelparameter to the quik.conf-file. 
what about the video-option? needed here? there is no append line at all in
the conf-file of quik.
another thing that I found out reading through the netbsd-pages: it seems that one can only boot hfs-filesystems, iso's from cd-rom's, hfs-floppy's and something called partition-zero from OpenFirmware 2.0.1. i wonder if that might be the problem, too? 

here's the url:
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.6/macppc/INSTALL.html#Available%20Boot%20Media
dbootstrap has created ext2fs on /dev/hda2. i thought that if i would place everything on an hfs-filesystem it would boot correctly? because it does boot the floppy. kind of 
simulation of a startdisk on the hard-disk? just an idea...


would really apreciate your help....
additional tips and suggestions would also be great.
i searched the whole evening for howtos or articles
on this subject but when you look for "debian install
powerbook" at google you are flooded with all kinds
of translations of debian's own install manual...



Actually many of these are quite useful, although you
should make sure they are talking about G3 powerbook, not newer powerbooks or ibooks.
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