Booting LFS LiveCD in Old World Mac

tuxdev · 08-07-2005, 03:36 PM

Is there a way to yaboot the CD or use a boot floppy with the CD acting as a root disk? Where can I get the files to do so?
Machine is a PowerMac 4400/200.

spooon · 08-09-2005, 04:23 AM

Old World Macs can't use yaboot and they can't use LiveCDs. Usually the quik bootloader (which boots from Open Firmware) is used. It is really complicated and involves changing stuff in Open Firmware and stuff. (Note: the BootX bootloader, which requires dual-boot with MacOS, can also be used; but I won't get into that here.) Here are some places with information about Open Firmware modifications you need to do:
* http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/models.html
* http://www.penguinppc.org/bootloaders/quik/

Then, for boot disks and root disks, etc. to install Linux, I recommend that you look at the following Debian files:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/wo...c/images-1.44/
This place has "boot-floppy-hfs.img", which is a MacOS boot disk which boots the Linux kernel, and then asks you to insert the "root.bin" floppy disk which has the Debian installer. The Debian installer can install quik for you.

Hope this helps.

tuxdev · 08-09-2005, 10:51 AM

I can't seem to boot the floppy. When I put it in and turn it on, it just reads a little bit, then pops the diskette out. Of course it boots in MacOS after that. Do I need to do anything special to force the diskette to boot?

spooon · 08-10-2005, 03:54 PM

Maybe you should download the image file again and use this script to write the floppy. If you don't lock the image file and open it, Disk Copy might remove the boot sector or something.

Alternately, you could try another floppy. Floppies tend to go bad really easily.

JoeyAdams · 06-12-2007, 03:24 PM

I found it works well to use an already working Linux system and just do this:

dd if=boot-floppy-hfs.img of=/dev/fd0

If the floppy doesn't work, you may need to fdformat it first. Also, make sure it's not a 400K disk

I have a question now: I tried using the boot-floppy-hfs.img on my Power Macintosh 6100, and it showed a Linux logo in place of the standard happy face for about 20 seconds, but then it filled the screen with garbage and stopped running. What could have caused that?