Re: Trying 2019-04-11 on PowerMac G4 Silver - [Solved]

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com>]

> On Apr 13, 2019, at 5:39 AM, Frank Scheiner <frank.scheiner@web.de> wrote:
> 
> Do you happen to have a smaller disk (e.g. below 128 GB) available for
> use? Or maybe you try with a separate small (512 MiB or so) `/boot`
> partition directly after the HFS bootstrap partition, so the kernel is
> located in the first GiB of this disk.


Thanks, Frank!  That was the clue it needed.

I used the 2019-04-12 iso for my most recent test, just incase there was a change that might affect the problem.

I did everything the same as I did for the original test, except that when it got to partitioning the disk, I chose guided partitioning and “Use whole disk, with LVM”.  The LVM part forces it to create a separate /boot partition directly after the HFS one.

That installed GRUB, which booted without a hitch.

So it appears that this model of PowerMac has boot firmware that doesn’t like the high-address parts of large disk drives.  Interestingly enough, this problem does not seem to affect the Linux kernel.  Once past the bootstrap firmware, it works fine with the 300GB disk.

Thanks to all!

Rick


root@dillserver:~# df -HTP | grep -v tmpfs
> Filesystem                      Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/dillserver--vg-root ext4       58G  1.1G   54G   2% /
> /dev/sda3                       ext2      248M   44M  192M  19% /boot
> /dev/sda2                       hfs        20M  9.1M   11M  46% /boot/grub

> root@dillserver:~# mac-fdisk -l /dev/sda
> /dev/sda
>         #                    type name                  length   base      ( size )  system
> /dev/sda1     Apple_partition_map Apple                     63 @ 1         ( 31.5k)  Partition map
> /dev/sda2         Apple_Bootstrap untitled               39063 @ 64        ( 19.1M)  NewWorld bootblock
> /dev/sda3         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled              500001 @ 39127     (244.1M)  Linux native
> /dev/sda4               Linux_LVM untitled           624603271 @ 539128    (297.8G)  Unknown
> /dev/sda5              Apple_Free Extra                     49 @ 625142399 ( 24.5k)  Free space
> 
> Block size=512, Number of Blocks=625142448
> DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

> root@dillserver:~# lvs
>   LV     VG            Attr       LSize  Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
>   root   dillserver-vg -wi-ao---- 54.44g                                                    
>   swap_1 dillserver-vg -wi-ao——  1.43g                                                    

> root@dillserver:~# vgs
>   VG            #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree   
>   dillserver-vg   1   2   0 wz—n- 297.83g <241.96g

> root@dillserver:~# lsblk
> NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
> sda                         8:0    0 298.1G  0 disk 
> |-sda1                      8:1    0  31.5K  0 part 
> |-sda2                      8:2    0  19.1M  0 part /boot/grub
> |-sda3                      8:3    0 244.1M  0 part /boot
> |-sda4                      8:4    0 297.9G  0 part 
> | |-dillserver--vg-root   254:0    0  54.5G  0 lvm  /
> | `-dillserver--vg-swap_1 254:1    0   1.4G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
> `-sda5                      8:5    0  24.5K  0 part