Unable to boot Power Mac G5 into LiveUSB

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lukezenoob · Post by **lukezenoob** » Mon Aug 08, 2022 2:06 am

I've dug up my late grandpa's Power Mac G5 and would like to try Gentoo on it, but recieve the same error everytime "LOAD-SIZE is too small"

I would've rather had a CD but all are write protected. That's a problem for another day. The disk has been formatted with the PPC/PPC64 ISO and not the PPC64LE one, I can confirm that.

Holding "C" to access the boot menu didn't exactly work either. Disk utility says the USB is bootable.

Am I doing the command wrong or something? I've looked up almost every Open Firmware guide.

Post by **fedeliallalinea** » Mon Aug 08, 2022 4:55 am

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo on PPC.

immolo · Post by **immolo** » Wed Oct 26, 2022 5:21 am

Did you fix this?

exuberantmonkey · Post by **exuberantmonkey** » Sun Apr 09, 2023 6:36 pm

To get a full boot menu on G5 you can press the Option key, apparently. This works on my Intel mac, and an apple support discussion indicates that it works on the G5. I think pressing C is the original option, for booting from CD or DVD, but the Option key gives you a menu of bootable partitions.

To boot from USB stick on the G5, it needs to be formatted using Apple Partition Map and at least 8 Gb.

I haven't tried this myself yet, but I have been searching for this info before I pick up a cheap G5 relic to run linux on.

exuberantmonkey · Post by **exuberantmonkey** » Thu May 18, 2023 11:36 pm

I've since obtained a powermac g5. These do not boot from USB devices (hard drives or thumb disks), not even hard drives formatted with HPS and hosting OS X.

You'll find instructions online for booting into open firmware (hold command-option-O-F during boot), and finding the OF path to your usb device, and execute boot from the OF command line. Nothing I tried could get any usb device to boot on a G5, though clearly it works for some people / devices / G5s.

What worked for me was to burn the minimal live CD image to a CD.