Re: Power Mac G4 stuck "Loading second stage bootstrap"

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com>]

Hi Bruno,

I haven’t been called “Ricky” by anyone since the last of my aunt’s died 10 years ago!  It feels kinda sweet.  But let’s stick with plain old “Rick”.

OK, so you’ve got a Wheezy netinst CD. and it’s really a G5 (they are kind of rare, so I wanted to be sure — one of my machines is almost identical!)

Without a working OS, you will need to find a way to eject the CD tray in order to boot from it.  Here’s the trick:

Turn on the machine while holding down the “ALT” key.  After the “bong” it will show a graphical screen with a little spinning “wrist-watch” cursor (probably in the upper left corner). There will also be an icon in the middle of the screen that is supposed to represent a hard disk.   It may have a little picture of Tux, the Linux penguin.  That represents your hard disk with the broken Jessie Gnu/Linux.  The cursor will spin for about a minute (it will feel like a long time, but I think it’s really only about 60 seconds) and eventually turn into an arrow cursor.  While the cursor is spinning the keyboard will be unresponsive.  Once it stops spinning you can proceed.  At this point, hit the “eject” key on your keyboard (triangle pointing upwards with a line under it) and the CD tray will eject.

Put the CD in the G5’s drive-tray and close the tray.  The cursor will go back to spinning for another minute.  When it stops, there will be two icons in the middle of the screen.  One will be the “disk” that we saw before, the other will represent the install CD.  Hit the “tab” key (or use the mouse) to highlight the CD icon.  Then hit the return key and it will boot from the CD.

You will get a “boot:” prompt and some explanatory text before it.  Hit the “tab” key to see a list of the various ways to install Wheezy.  You want the simplest-possible option, with the minimum-effort.  So type “install” at the prompt.  Hit “return” and you’re off and installing!

Answer all the questions.  If you get to any questions you don’t understand, send me an email and I’ll try to guide you through it.

Enjoy!

Rick



On Sep 22, 2014, at 8:51 PM, bruno evangelista <brunoevangelista@hotmail.com> wrote:

> You said:   If you can make a Wheezy “netinst” disk on some other computer (Windows, Linux or Mac) please let me know and we’ll take it one step at a time from there.   It is done.
> 
> You said:   We’ll take it one step at a time from there.  I say:  I am eager for the next steps.
> 
> Thank you very much, Ricky.
> 
> Bruno