Installtion trouble on MDD G4

[MacFanatic39]

Hello all,

I am trying to install Gentoo on my MDD dual gigs G4. Aside from the standard prob of not being able to boot with the regular 'live' mode on the disc with a MDD G4, I am not able to boot with the 'live-safe' option. I begins loading with Tux at the top and it's checking my machine for stuff. Then it always just stops at

[Lycander]

Could you tell us which LiveCD you are using? Such as the version number.
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* Blessing /dev/hda2 with holy penguin pee

[MacFanatic39]

[MacFanatic39]

Anyone???

[Lycander]

Can't say that I've ever seen such a message before. At the risk of being labeled as a traitor, I'd advise you try YellowDog Linux or any of the other PPC distros if you're in a rush to get Linux up and going.

There is:

Debian
Mandrake
SuSE

in addition to YDL.
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* Blessing /dev/hda2 with holy penguin pee

[MacFanatic39]

I would, but none of thos have the newest verions of yaboot that my system requires. It's hopeless. Guess I'll hafta tear an old peecee outta my closet to run RedHat til I can get something on here. My 7200/90 ran Linux better tha nthis G4 LOL.

Thanks,
MacFanatic39

[genfoo]

sounds like a very old kernel problem on the install CD's to me ... they used to enable 'Plug and Play' which would stop you at exactly that point (it's actually trying to scan the non-existant ISA bus)

[MacFanatic39]

[genfoo]

It used to be fixed, but it's all about the config they use for the live cd kernel, and it seems like it's a broken config being used that has that optioni enabled.

I can't give you good advice for this.. the live cd uses some specific kernel modules (like gcloop) which is required to use the live environment and is not included in standard kernel sources. You will have to either wait for them to fix or build your own live cd.

Building a live cd is not for the faint of heart, and I'm not sure if they even publish the scripts to do so, but in any case you need a working linux system to do all of the above :/

[Lycander]

Is it possible to:

- partition your drive into 2 paritions
- reinstall OSX on one partition
- begin installing Gentoo from within OSX

You'd probably need to build the filesystem tools in OSX, mac-fdisk, mk*fs, etc. Logout and log in as Console to get to a command prompt only, mac-fdisk to create the Gentoo partitions, etract stage3 into the Gentoo root partition, go from there. It's just a matter of figuring out what order to do the steps in. If you can chroot into that I think you can run portage to get the rest of the packages like yaboot, kernel source, and get that properly configured.
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* Blessing /dev/hda2 with holy penguin pee

[Lycander]

I'm poking around my kernel config right now, just found MESH in "SCSI low-level drivers" section within SCSI Support.

If you have an external firewire or USB CD drive I wonder if you can boot the LiveCD off of that since MESH is for PowerMac internal SCSI support, and I believe IDE CD drives are still used through SCSI emulation.
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* Blessing /dev/hda2 with holy penguin pee

[genfoo]

as I posted above, it's got nothing to do with the MESH stuff.. it just happens to choke on the thing right after it loads mesh .. which is plug and play ... it chokes trying to scan the (non existant) ISA bus.

[kmschindler]

Hi

As the subject says: Same problem here on a MDD G4 Dual 867 MHz

I tried to partition the disk differently, but no luck.

BTW. I have two IDE disks.

Therefore, I tried to boot from the LiveCD with one of the drives disconnected or the other or both. The corresponding error messages appeared but the boot continued up to the same message as before:

scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices
mesh: configured for synchronous 5 MB/s

and then the boot gets stuck

Should one post a bug report?

[MacFanatic39]

sounds like a bug if multiple people are having this problem. I think I'll report it. God, I miss gentoo. iWant it back on my main comp!