Re: Booting into Tumbleweed on a G5

On Feb 28 2019, David Faure <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm trying to install tumbleweed ppc64 onto an old Mac G5 for a friend (completely replacing the old OS X on the machine).
> The install (from a DVD-RW) actually went fine... but I can't boot into it.
> All I see on boot is the finder icon alternating with a "?", like it can't find any boot partition or boot code.
> The installer did create a "PowerPC PreP boot" partition on /dev/sda1, but somehow the ?BIOS? doesn't find it?

PReP is for IBM POWER systems, useless for Mac.

You need a mac disk label, with a Apple_Bootstrap partition formatted as
hfs with a special layout.  The ppc version of lilo can format such a
boot partition.  I don't know if grub has support for booting a Mac.

On my G5 with oS 13.1 it looks like this:

# hmount /dev/sda2
Volume name is "SuSE Linux boot partition"
Volume was created on Tue Nov 10 00:40:11 2009
Volume was last modified on Mon Feb 25 20:48:59 2019
Volume has 131373056 bytes free
# hls -l suseboot
f  FNDR/MACS       286         0 Sep 14  1999 Finder
f  tbxi/chrp         0      2429 Feb 25 20:48 os-chooser
f  zsys/MACS    243673         0 May 25  2001 System
f  BINA/UNIX         0    487296 Feb 25 20:48 yaboot
f  TEXT/R*ch         0      1968 Feb 25 20:48 yaboot.conf

Andreas.

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Andreas Schwab, [email protected]
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