[SOLVED] G4 ubuntu installation won't boot

[davereynoldz]

Hi guys, I have an old G4 which I've set up as a little home file server since the P3 I had for this seems to have died. I put ubuntu on it but now it won't boot up, I just get the little flashing question mark. I've downloaded and installed the powerpc ubuntu server edition on my G4 and everything went fine, the installation completed with no errors. I used an automatic partition setup for the main partition so it did all the boot stuff by itself. It just won't boot.

I have a 500 gig sata hard drive attached via a pci sata card but it is not a boot drive, although I don't know how the G4 knows this as theres no settings that I can find to specify the boot sequence?

Would be really nice if anyone could point me in the right direction? I'd really like to get this little machine up and running as a file server, don't want to have to go out and buy some new bits.

[lisati]

Edit: I asked a dumb question from not reading the original post properly. Please ignore this post.

[davereynoldz]

Forgot to mention I've tried two different hard drives so I don't think its a problem with the drive. Yaboot boots fine off the cd so I don't think theres a problem with that either. The hard drive is jumpered cable select, on the end of its strap.

[mfox]

I had the same problem when I tried to make a dual boot Ubuntu on a G3 beige tower. If your's is an "old world Mac" like my beige, they allow use of only 128gb on the drive and the startup files have to be present on the first 8gb of the drive. If you have one of these Macs and you upgraded to a larger drive than it came with, you would be advised to partition a large drive so that the first partition (startup volume) is within the first 8 GB of disk space. This is a limitation of the old IDE hardware. The second partition can be up to a total of 128 GB for both partitions. I don't know that the boot partition within the first 8gb would normally be a problem, but if you are making a dual boot system and you have one of these macs, the files that enable Linux might be put in a place on the disk where the hardware wouldn't detect them at startup. If this applies to you, the solution would be to reformat the drive with the first Mac partition being 7.5gb in capacity and installing the System on it.

Having said all this about the old world Mac limitations, I never really found out if this was the only problem or it was something else additional, but I couldn't successfully install 7.10 and get it to boot. Following advice from another Mac person, I installed 6.06LTS and this worked. One of the differences upon installation is the default partitioning - 7.10 made separate partitions for /, /home and scratch, whereas 6.06 combined the / and /home in one partition. I don't know if the latter scheme worked because it dealt with the 8gb issue or if it was something else, so I've mentioned all of these things in my post. I hope it helps.

[stream303]

I have a 500 gig sata hard drive attached via a pci sata card but it is not a boot drive, although I don't know how the G4 knows this as theres no settings that I can find to specify the boot sequence?

Have you tried holding down the alt/option key shortly after powering up, clicking on the icon for the drive you want to boot from, and then clicking on the right-arrow icon?

Which machine do you have? This will help determine if you even run across this problem:
http://www.everymac.com/

Mfox is right about the partitioning limitations - the early new-world G3's sometimes had the 8gb limitation (partition to no more than say 7gb to be conservative), and some later machines had 128gb limitations (partition to 125gb or less to be conservative), but you may not have this problem depending on your machine.

[davereynoldz]

The mac is one of these: http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...ac_g4_450.html A power mac G4 450. The drive is only 120 gig and I have used the entire drive for the ubuntu installation. I have also installed this system on a spare 20 gig drive using the full drive with a full format and get the same problem.

When I hold down the alt key it detects no bootable drives and gives no options, despite there being a bootable ubuntu drive plugged in.

My hunch is that the power mac is attempting to boot from the sata drive on the raid card and/or simply ignoring the ide drive containing the installation. This 500 gig drive is my 'dump' area for my filesystem which I want to keep as a basic ext3 filesystem with no boot sector or os, for easy swapping from system to system. I have a second 300 gig sata drive which I was going to attempt to use as the primary os drive but it is in another computer and needs some (large quantities of) data saved somewhere else temporarily.

If this were an intel system I would be inspecting the boot sequence in the bios and bootability of this drive, ie master/slave situation. I believe I have it jumpered and cabled correctly, I have even tried unplugging the cd drive and sata drive to no avail. The system is quite happy to boot straight off a cd without holding the 'c' key so my assumption (as an intel user who knows nothing about macs) is that it is set to boot from cd only in its... 'bios'?

[davereynoldz]

Oh, and I can boot into open firmware by holding cmd+opt+O+F, which according to thie website: http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/suzanne/startup.html indicates it is a 'ne world' mac.

I am trying to use open firmware to work out what the system is detecting but I'm not sure how right now.

[stream303]

eeks - those dual-driver Macs can be troublesome. I've got a hunch that the device line in your /etc/yaboot.conf isn't correct or nearly blank, even though yaboot said it installed.

You may have to go in with the live cd, and run

blkid

to get a better idea of what the device line needs and follow up with a ybin. There have been a few threads on this here and in the archives - I'd have to dig through them again..

So let's see if your yaboot.conf has an openfirmware path listed in the device line first...

[davereynoldz]

Ok: a development! In open firmware I have instructed the mac to boot yaboot specifically with this command: boot hd:0,\yaboot it then reports the following:

DISK-LABEL: LOAD (noninterposed) not supportedload-size=0 adler32=1

LOAD-SIZE is too small

So there you go... now what? yaboot settings? I have tried inspecting this stuff by booting up the cd with the rescue option and dropping into a shell (this is an ubuntu server disc mind), but despite saying it will mount filesystem drives it does not. I can't seem to mount them manually either, so can't really inspect whats going on.

Do I need some different install settings perhaps?

*edit: didnt see your response there stream, seems you were on to it, I gather at least. This mac stuff might as well be in russian for all the sense it makes to me, but I am learning. I'll have a bit more of a poke around with the live cd.

[davereynoldz]

blkid output:

#blkid
/dev/hda1: TYPE="hfs"
/dev/hda5: UUID="3119d273-e9bf-4330-91de-0d84f96712a9" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/hda6 TYPE="swap" UUID="another large hex code"
/dev/sda1: UUID="and another hex code" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

Sorry I couldn't copy/paste it so I omitted what I figured wasn't relevant rather than typing out massive hex codes

yaboot.conf:

boot=/dev/hda1
device=/pci@f2000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@7/ata-4@1f000/disk@0
partition=5
root=dev/hda5
timeout=50
install=/usr/lib/yaboot/yaboot
magicboot=/usr/lib/yaboot/ofboot
enablecdboot

image=/boot/vmlinux
    label=Linux
    read-only
    initrd=/boot/initrd.img
    append="quiet splash"

image=/boot/vmlinux.old
    label=old
    read-only
    initrd=/boot/initrd.img.old
    append="quiet splash"
(END)

So there it is... what needs to be changed to what?

One thing I can see there is it says "partition=5" although I'm not sure what this is referring to but it looks like it is referring to hda1? should this be something like partition=0 or partition=1? hda5 certainly contains my root file system I've confirmed that, and hda1-4 seem to be the various mac boot partitions (why so many?)