Re: Current status on grub-installer on PowerMac

[Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk>]

On 16/04/2021 06:50, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

> On 4/16/21 1:27 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> > > Yeah. From what I can see from links [1] and [2] I'd expect this to be working now.
> > > Let me run an install of the latest ISO here, since then I can then use a debugger
> > > on QEMU/OpenBIOS to find out what the problem may be.
> > (...)
> > The main problem I found was that starting from a blank drive image in QEMU the
> > /boot/grub HFS partition wasn't being created - see the attached PNGs where part-original.png
> > is the layout from the default guided installation and part-modified.png is after I had
> > manually removed the / partition, added the /boot/grub HFS partition (I guess a 32MB size?)
> > and then assigned the remaining space to the / partition once again.
> > (...)
> > # grub-install --macppc-directory=/boot/grub/
> >
> > (this installed /boot/grub/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX which was missing before?)
>
> Your machine is obviously not detected as a New World PowerMac and thus, none of the mechanisms for
> New World PowerMacs are applied. If archdetect doesn't show you're on a "powerpc/powermac_newworld",
> neither the automatic partioning nor the installation of GRUB for PowerMacs is triggered correctly.

I see, thanks - my confusion was that the old installer used to always set up the 
partitioning regardless of the machine type and so it was possible to boot on both an 
Old World and a New World machine.

Are Old World Macs no longer supported?

> > # umount /boot/grub/
> > # hmount /dev/sda3
> > Volume name is "untitled"
> > Volume was created on Thu Apr 15 20:51:52 2021
> > Volume was last modified on Thu Apr 15 21:48:40 2021
> > Volume has 22705664 bytes free
> > root@debian:/boot# hls
> > fonts             grub.cfg          locale            powerpc-ieee1275
> > grub              grubenv           mach_kernel       System
> > # hattrib -b :System:Library:CoreServices
> > # hattrib -c chrp -t tbxi :System:Library:CoreServices:BootX
>
> So, I thought setting the filetype isn't necessary?

I think it shouldn't be - I can test later but mostly I just wanted to use something 
that was known to work so I could debug the boot process.


ATB,

Mark.