Re: Updated Debian Ports installation images
On 3/26/22 2:16 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On 3/26/22 04:06, Stan Johnson wrote:
>> My installation attempt using CD [2] above on a PowerBook G3 Pismo (500
>> MHz; 2 GiB memory) failed.
>>
>> 1) I started with a blank 120 GB disk. I partitioned the disk to include
>> partitions (after the Apple drive partitions) for Apple_Bootstrap
>> (/dev/sda6; 10 MiB), Mac OS 9 (/dev/sda7; 1 GiB), Mac OS X (/dev/sda8; 7
>> GiB), Debian rootfs (/dev/sda9; 16 GiB), and swap (/dev/sda10; 2 GiB) --
>> I left the rest of the disk un-partitioned.
>
> You are missing the HFS partition that gets mounted to /boot/grub. You
> either used one of the older, broken images or you ignored the warning
> during partitioning that a system without /boot/grub won't be able to
> boot.
I used the image from your 18 Mar 2022 message:
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2022-03-18/non-free/
>
>> 2) The installation CD booted and GRUB worked. I chose a default
>> installation with manual partitioning, using the partitions I set up in
>> step 1. Everything worked as expected until GRUB installation, which
>> failed. The error message was that GRUB failed to install on /dev/sda9
>> (the rootfs, not the Apple_Bootstrap, partition).
>
> What image did you use?
>
>> 3) In step 2, I thought it might have failed because my Apple_Bootstrap
>> partition could have been too small, so I tried the installation again,
>> choosing a default installation using the entire disk with only the
>> default partitions. The resulting sizes were approximately as follows:
>> Apple_Bootstrap (/dev/sda2; 256 MB); Debian rootfs (/dev/sda3; ~115
>> GiB); and swap (/dev/sda4; ~768 MB). So this Apple_Bootstrap was
>> certainly larger than the one I used in step 1, and I was optimistic
>> that everything would work. But GRUB installation failed again, with the
>> error message that "grub-install /dev/sda3" failed. Even if this had
>> worked, it appears that I would have lost the Apple drivers needed to
>> boot Mac OS 9.
>
> GRUB does not use the Apple_Bootstrap partition. It uses an HFS filesystem
> that gets mounted to /boot/grub. You cannot get a bootable system without
> that partition.
AFAIK, GRUB needs to use Apple_Bootstrap (how else will Open Firmware
know how to boot?). And the Apple_Bootstrap partition is formatted as
HFS (but "Apple_Bootstrap" instead of "Apple_HFS" so Mac OS won't access
it).
>
>> 4) Booting into rescue mode on the installation CD, I was also not able
>> to install GRUB on the Apple_Bootstrap partition directly (e.g. after
>> step 3, I tried "grub-install /dev/sda2"). The error message was that
>> the partition was not a partition of type PReP.
>
> It's because GRUB is not installed onto the Apple_Bootstrap partition.
> PReP partitions are used on IBM machines among other systems but not
> on Apple machines.
Yes, I understand. I didn't choose to use a PReP partition; that was the
error message from the GRUB installation.
>
>> Please let me know of anything else that I could try.
>
> What image did you use? Please reference the URL.
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2022-03-18/non-free/
>
> And if you used the correct image, what steps did you perform?
I booted the installation image and chose a default installation.
> Did you run in expert mode? I could imagine that expert mode turns off all
> warnings and therefore it didn't tell you when your manual partitioning
> resulted in an unusable partition layout.
In my second test (step 3 from my earlier message) I chose a default
installation and told the partitioner to use the entire disk. The
installer repartitioned the disk to contain the following partitions:
1: /dev/sda1 - partition map
2: /dev/sda2 - Apple_Bootstrap (hfs, 256 MB)
3) /dev/sda3 - Debian rootfs (ext4, ~110 GB)
4) /dev/sda4 - Linux swap (swap, ~768 MB)
>
> Adrian
>
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