Re: no way to boot from mobile firewire hdd?
2g wrote:
since my iBookG4's internal hdd got dead
bought
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10558
could happily restore osx and boot from it
but installing debian nor ubuntu seem to fail at
installing yaboot process
I got my 40gb "G-drive" firewire 400 to boot by temporarily using
another system to issue yaboot from (ybin actually) - perhaps you could
use a live distro temporarily to issue the ybin commands to your
firewire drive.
This is probably not the most efficient way to do this, and could have a
few errors as it was a real caffeinated situation. :) If anyone sees
any errors or easier ways, please tell me. I'm not a firewire expert as
we'll soon see.
What I did was boot Ubuntu (long since purged - maybe you could use a
live Debian CD, etc) and finish the Debian install on the firewire drive
even though it is still unbootable at this point.
At the terminal in your live-cd (in my case my internally-booted distro)
run:
find /proc/device-tree -name 'sbp-2@*'
This was the result and I made a note of it:
/proc/device-tree/ht@0,f2000000/pci@3/firewire@e/node@0001d202e0a60004/sbp-2@c000
Mount the firewire drive, and find the yaboot.conf file in it's own
filesystem. Below is a snippet of the edits I made to this file - maybe
this could help you out:
<snip>
boot=/dev/sdb2
partition=3
ofboot=fw/node@0001d202e0a60004/sbp-2@c000/disk@0:
device=fw/node@0001d202e0a60004/sbp-2@c000/disk@0:
root=/dev/sdb3
timeout=100
install=/usr/lib/yaboot/yaboot
magicboot=/usr/lib/yaboot/ofboot
enablecdboot
<snip>
Note the format of the ofboot and device lines which contained some of
the info gleaned from the previous find command. With a dead internal
drive, maybe your devices will be sda instead of sdb?
Copy this edited yaboot.conf file to the /etc directory of your live-cd
or internally booted system. (be sure to make a backup of this
*original* yaboot.conf if you are using an internally booted distro!)
Now in /etc of your booted system where this freshly-edited yaboot.conf
file from your firewire drive came from, run
mkofboot -v
Hopefully the drive will get blessed at this point, and if you reboot it
should boot from the firewire drive. In my case, if I wanted a choice
of either the firewire drive or the internal hardrive to boot from, I
just held down ctrl-option and made my boot selection when both drive
icons showed up.
I did notice when I was testing out Ubuntu and Debian Etch-testing that
only Ubuntu came up with a yaboot warning prompting me to see if I
wanted to finish the install, whereas Debian did not warn me and just
finished the install anyway - although both required manual editing of
the yaboot.conf file in either case.
At any rate I hope this helps. I'd like to thank Ben and all of the
Debian PPC team for making PPC linux a real pleasure for me so far on my
G5 iMac.
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