7.10 issue on boot

[Venom_Man]

i downloaded a 7.10 live cd for ppc and when i try to boot from the cd i get to the screen where it asks me to boot and it starts to boot but then on my imac (old school G3) it shuts down my computer. I try doing it again but i got the same result, so i tried it on my G4 tower and instead of shutting down the computer it appeared to freeze with an all black screen and a little white command prompt line in the corner of the screen. if anyones nows of a solution or what the problem is i would greatly appreciate it.

[digitaljon]

I'm having the same problem. I'm using Edubuntu though. I'm also using old school G3 iMac. HELP!!!!:(

[VidiotGeek]

I think I'm in the same boat as you guys. I let Ubuntu run the upgrade last night from 7.04 to 7.10 thinking there wouldn't be a hitch. I was wrong. When I went to reboot, it fails at the initial splash screen & drops into a kernel prompt. Pretty much the same way it does for you. I'm trying to figure out if there is any tool or something that I can use to verify my install. The 7.04 Live CD doesn't seem to have anything more than GParted & I'm not nearly skilled enough with a CLI yet to accomplish anything. Is there a PowerPC version of KNOPPIX or another distro that is more oriented or better prepared for a rescue mission?

[aonegodman]

I'm in the same boat after doing an auto update in 7.10 last night.

The only other issue I had was Pingus game locked up on trying to Exit. Could not get it to shut down even from the System Monitor. Just kept playing game music - had to RESET.

Now - I have read that this throws Ubuntu into some type of fxdsk, like chkdsk, thing that it has to run on reboot and that this can cause this black screen halt issue also.

Comments ? :confused:

[Aphoxema]

I had the same problem, then I reinstalled xubuntu 7.04. I really like some of the features in 7.10 and I'd like to have them on my laptop (a Pismo).

I'm sure this is something to do with the kernel, it seems to have a much different configuration every time April and October come around. For example, I had to boot 6.10 on my desktop with PCI=NOMMCONF but 7.04 it booted without the parameter but then it wouldn't resume from standby.

Has anyone had any luck installing 7.10 but booting from 7.04 kernel/modules?

[aonegodman]

):P Followup on prior post.

As it turns out for me Ubuntu was doing a chkdsk thing on my HD and all I had to do was be patient while it did its thing.

I walked away from the black screen and came back 10 or minutes later and my desktop was back.

Yippy!!! :D

[Aphoxema]

I'm still wondering if this is a problem. I've experimented with this installation alot and I'm tempted to just reinstall anyways. I really want 7.10 for the better wireless support.

If no one really has an answer to the problem with pismo and 7.10 PPC, I'll just go ahead and try installing it again tonight.

[Venom_Man]

i still cant get it to work either

[Washer]

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCKnownIssues

Ok that's it. I'm tired of posting this link. Brb I'm going to bitch/moan till someone stickies a thread with that link at the top.

[Aphoxema]

Thank you for the information, Washer, but when I do those steps...

Boot with live-nosplash-powerpc video=ofonly break=top
Get to the initramfs line and do modprobe ide-core and exit

It says, because I'm too tired to type it all out...

http://operationinertia.org/temp/Picture25.JPG

And the line I think looks important but is a little fuzzy says "Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init"

I feel like I know a fair bit about GNU/Linux then I run into this kind of thing and I'm hit by a shovel all over again.

[Washer]

A bit of googling (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3776646&postcount=25) later.. try adding the option all_generic_ide to the kernel parameters

You could also try the alternate install cd.

[Aphoxema]

all_generic_ide (alone or with break=top) doesn't seem to make any difference with the LiveCD and the hard drive is a Fujitsu.

I've tried using the alternate install disk quite a bit and it gives me a different problem but I believe it's related. It will not detect the CD drive (normally /dev/hde, which isn't present) and working in BusyBox is way too limiting. I believe the kernel modules I need haven't been included in the install image, I can't use the ethernet, and when I try to mount /dev/hda3 /media/target it tells me it's an invalid arguement. When I try mount /dev/hda3 /media/target -t ext3, it says the device isn't present when /dev/hda3 really does appear to exist.

It'll see /dev/sda1 when I plug in my USB flash drive thingie, but it's formatted in fat or ntfs and neither is included in the live image and I have alot of stuff on it that'll make it a hassle to format it to extfs at the moment, so I can't use it to copy modules or anything but I think it might work, but I want to have some idea that it'll solve the problem before I go through the trouble.

Just to be clear, I have a Powerbook Pismo and the only change from spec it's had is added memory. Feisty works spectacularly, I only had to rewrite xorg.conf to get it to desktop, but I really would like to get 7.10 going so I can have better wireless support and there's just alot of little things that are so much better rounded in it.

What I might just end up doing, though, is waiting until 8.04 and hope I don't have these same problems with it.

[stream303]

Hmm.. just a shot in the dark here....

Do you have enough disk space? I wonder if you are using guided partitioning to use the whole disk, or just trying to install to free space, which might not be enough?

[Aphoxema]

I haven't gotten to that step yet. When I install Gutsy, I intend to overwrite the entire hard drive which is about 5 gigs.

[cryptocoryne]

I had this problem on a Lombard G3 Powerbook. I tried a whole buncha PPC distributions(Gutsy, YDL, Fedora, Debian) and none of them would boot. It always got stuck at the splash screen and then the busybox prompt appeared. I tried all sorts of boot parameters and modprobing ide-this and ide-that but nothing worked.

The only distribution that would install was Slackintosh 12. I thought this distribution's pkg package manager sucked so I reformatted / and installed Debian (PPC) Etch in its place. It was impossible to install Etch from scratch because there's something screwed up with Etch's partitioning tools. (If you try to install Etch on an unpartitioned disk, installation of yaboot always fails. Even when I let Debian wipe the disk and create all the partitions automatically, yaboot install still fails.) It is possble to get Etch on, but I needed to format/partition/install yaboot to the disk with Slackintosh 12 and then reboot from the Debian CD, skipping the partition/yaboot install steps in the Debian installer.

After all this trouble I still had lots of problems with the filesystem getting corrupted. (errors about lost interrupts in the log and then major filesystem corruption, usually requiring a reinstall.) I thought the problem was that I was using a CF-IDE adaptor that was just poorly supported by the IDE modules, but having read this thread, I'm beginning to wonder....

I gave up and went back to using Panther on a 10GB hard drive, which has been slow but reliable. I did not try installing linux on the hard disk, because it's a huge pain if you want to reinstall Panther on a Lombard with 512MB RAM: you have to take out half the RAM or else the Panther install crashes halfway through.

Safari sucks on such a slow machine, but Camino is decent. I'm pretty discouraged with PPC linux and old hardware. The nostalgia has worn off and I've gone running back to my macbook. If I want more frustrating nostalgia, I'll try configuring Emacs to read gmail or try to network my heap of old DOS PCs. :)

[UnCola]

I am getting 3 1/2 to 4 minutes of grey screen before 7.10 boots - it used to be under a minute, and no grey screen.

I have reinstalled from a new CD of 7.10, then rebooted several times.

Before that I had breezy and that was fine, after I downloaded the upgrades of 7.10 it had developed and issue where on booting it gave a long list of files that it said did not correspond to their backups. Then for the first time ever yesterday it would not boot, not even showing the grub loader.

I booted up in xp and ran a check - the hard drive, memory etc are all fine.

Does this grey screen go away later? I think I'd prefer going back to breezy.

PS on T40 dual booting with xp posted here after searching for grey screen.

[Aphoxema]

I'm still not getting anywhere with this. I've played with the alt-install for hours but I just couldn't figure out some way to get the CD drive to work after it booted.

All I really want to know is what is different about the kernel or the kernel configuration in 7.10 than 7.04 that keeps it from booting on this Pismo so I can at least try recompiling the kernel myself.