Re: Installation, Debian 12, iMac G5, USB thumb drive => “Your installation media couldn’t be mounted. “

[Ken Cunningham <ken.cunningham.webuse@gmail.com>]

I have always just burned the ISO to a CD on a Mac, and then mounted it using the "C" key during system bootup.

Never had a problem doing that on any machine... works every time.

I have read endless reports of people trying and failing to use a USB key to install debian on PPC machines, however. Sometimes it seems to work for some people -- usually it seems people have lots of trouble.

Does your CD drive not work?

K

On 2025-08-28, at 4:53 AM, Joe Flowers wrote:

On the “Detect and mount installation media” step, I get, “Your installation media couldn’t be mounted. “

I burned debian-12.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso on a 4GB USB drive with rufus-4.9p.exe. Rufus said it had to use the dd method.

When the iMac G5 is booted up with Mac OS X Version 10.5.8, I can see and browse the USB drive and read text files on it.

I can boot to the USB drive with Federico Vaga’s excellent post (https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2024/02/msg00007.html => boot usb0/disk@1:,\boot\grub\powerpc.elf), and the Debian installation seems to proceed fine until I get to this error.

“Your installation media couldn’t be mounted... “ “Retry mounting installation media?”

I have not been able to get the Built-in Ethernet port nor a USB to Ethernet dongle to work when booted in Mac OS X, but I was hoping the Debian installation media could work with either of those two Ethernet hardware options. I do not have a WiFi card in this iMac G5, apparently.

Any ideas, please?

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debian-12.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso
SHA256: 1483ae25b215e69cbd2268b4aa58b23bc7f5522f6fc5697213af39cee6704c50

rufus-4.9p.exe
SHA256: 497f796e6d076d4855d697965c04626e6d3624658fce3eca82ab14f7414eede2

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