I recently divided my Powerbook G3 Lombard hard drive into 2
partitions. First, I initialized the hard drive with the writing zeros option. Next, I created two partitions. Partition one is a Hfs mac partition at the beginning of the hard drive where I intend to install debian. I installed Mac OS 8.6 on the second partition at the end of the hard drive. When I rebooted after installing Mac OS 8.6 I got the Mac folder with the question mark and an open firmware screen shortly thereafter. I got a rom checksum failure message at the top of the open firmware screen. I tried to boot into the Mac OS by typing at the open firmware prompt the following: boot hd:8,\\:tbxi and I got a message that said the "CLAIM" failed. The powerbook will not boot from the original Mac OS 8.6 cd. The Powerbook will not boot from my Linux Debian install cd. The Powerbook will not boot at all.

I zapped the pram, reset the Powerbook with it's rear reset button, and disabled the hard drive using the keyboard key combination: option, command, shift and delete, but none of that worked. I tried to boot from the cd by holding down the c key, but that didn't work either. I even physically disconnected the hard drive from the laptop. The Powerbook did not power on when I disconnected the hard drive. I even replaced the newer top memory with the original memory, but that didn't work either.

I was running Linux Debian on my Powerbook before, but was having a lot of problems with sig 11 error messages and access of bad kernel area. I had to run fsck /dev/hda8 many times. So I decided to initialize the hard drive.

Can anyone help me troubleshoot this problem?

Well, 1st off, Debian won't run on hfs. 2nd, ROM checksum error. Looks like you've got some faulty rom. If you do, I can't help you. Not that big on hardware.

I'm aware that Linux Debian will not run on an hfs partition. I was simply describing the things I did before I got the rom checksum failure message. I would have deleted the hfs partition using mac-fdisk when I would have created my Linux Debian partitions.

Thanks for your advice anyway.

Bill

bill50,

if you can get back into open firmware, run "reset-all". this will reset open firmware and possibly do the trick. claim error is usually due to a memory failure of some sort.

I'm afraid that the reset-all command did not do it.

Bill

go here . these tips have helped me in the past. good luck!