Re: Debian Sarge on oldworld Powermac?
On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 13:16, Ralf Schlatterbeck wrote:
> Hello,
> I recently inherited several (4) oldworld 7600 Powermacs, one of them
> 132MHz, the others 120. I have successfully installed woody on one of
> them using a boot floppy.
>
> The floppy booting is a *very* erroneous process, I was usually
> successful booting from a floppy only after 5-6 tries. In addition two
> of the macs have defective floppy drives and I don't want starting
> swapping drives. Also once the mac-OS is gone, the boot floppies don't
> seem to boot anymore? So this is not a viable option, especially since I
> don't have any mac-OS disks to restart a system that doesnt have mac-OS
> on the hard drive.
> So I think there must be a better way to boot these beasts into a d-i.
> I'd really like to contribute my experience with these machines back if
> I can get some pointers...
>
Hi! Ralf,
Try getting a floppy drive cleaning kit. (They may be available at your
local office supply store if you can't find them at a computer supply
store. You may have to try a couple of places because they are no
longer big-selling items and a lot of places have dropped them from
inventory.) The business part of a drive cleaning kit looks like a
3.3-inch floppy but it has a soft fiber disk inside rather than one made
of oxide coated mylar. They usually have a bottle of "cleaning fluid"
that you're supposed to put a few drops of on the fiber disk before
running the cleaning procedure.
Don't be afraid to use it two or three times on an old floppy drive that
is badly gummed up with dust and crud. You'll see a marvelous
improvement in the error rate in the boot-from-floppy process.
The best way I've found to boot OldWorld Macs is with BootX, a little
program that runs under MacOS and loads a Linux kernel and (optionally)
a compressed initial-ram-disk image, then passes control to the kernel.
It's available from Ben Herrenschmidt, the author, at
http://penguinppc.org/~benh/BootX_1.2.2.sit
It requires that you have MacOS installed as the primary boot system,
but you can get away with significantly less than 100 MB of disk
dedicated to this if you use MacOS 7.5.3, which is available for free
download from Apple at
http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3/
All 19 floppy images of it! An alternative URL for this is:
http://igsi.tripod.com/mac/index753.htm
Enjoy!
Rick
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