Error while booting PPC install disk on Blue and White G3

Message

bowenl2 · Post by **bowenl2** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 8:05 am

Hello everyone
I recently acquired a Blue and White G3, so I figured I would put Gentoo on it. I've installed Gentoo several times on x86 and amd64 but this is my first attempt at ppc. I've burnt the minimal install CD and I can get yaboot to come up. I simply hit return at the boot prompt and it loads the kernel and the ramdisk. Then, it gives me a bizarre error message whose meaning neither I or Google could easily decipher:

DEFAULT CATCH!, code=900 at %SRR0: ff818d70 %SSR1: 0000b030

I have no idea what "Default Catch" means, though from what I can gather this message is not emitted by Linux, but rather by something Apple wrote (or am I wrong?) It seems odd to me that this would happen /after/ the ramdisk is loaded.

I currently have OSX installed and the system seems to work fine with that. I'm using OpenFirmware 3.1.1, and the Apple PowerMac1,1 1.1f4 BootROM (04/09/99). Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

gringo · Post by **gringo** » Mon Nov 16, 2009 9:34 am

i think you should type ppc32 and then hit enter, the 64bit kernel is loaded by default IIRC, so maybe that´s your problem.

cheers

bowenl2 · Post by **bowenl2** » Tue Nov 17, 2009 1:38 am

Wonderful! Thanks very much - Looks like the G5 kernel was booting by default. Strangely, I'm getting this error now later on in booting...
No filesystem could mount root, tried: ext3 ext2 squashfs vfat iso9660 xfs
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,0)
that I'll have to look into.

Loafy · Post by **Loafy** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 5:53 am

Worked for me too! Thanks!

vashatako · Post by **vashatako** » Wed Dec 30, 2009 8:00 pm

Hi, I'm a bit new to Linux and forums in general; but here's my predicament.

I have a 15" G4 Powerbook, 1.33 GHz, standard issue, and I've been trying to put Gentoo on it. Whenever I pop in either the PPC Minimal CD or the PPC Universal CD, I hit return to boot the kernel, and the same error comes up:

Code: Select all

Invalid memory access at SRR0: 014072e0 SRR1: 00803030

Then the computer boots up Apple Firmware in the terminal. The PowerBook is essentially clean, nothing on it except basic Apple apps and a few pictures and documents. I was wondering if anyone of this forum had any idea of what's going on. Thank you.

Post by **nixnut** » Thu Dec 31, 2009 4:09 pm

Merged above post here since it's the very likely same problem. Don't press enter directly to boot, but type in ppc32 first and then press enter so that the cd boots the 32-bits ppc32 kernel instead of the default 64-bits G5 kernel.

vashatako · Post by **vashatako** » Thu Dec 31, 2009 7:59 pm

Works as well; thanks for the info!

rsala · Post by **rsala** » Wed Feb 23, 2011 4:35 pm

I can't help but think that this might be a useful addition to the ppc install docs?

Error while booting PPC install disk on Blue and White G3

Error while booting PPC install disk on Blue and White G3

PowerBook G4 Gentoo Install Failing