I have a old power mac 5500/225 and I would like to install linux to it. When it is turned on I can hear the hard drive spin up. It has a floppy drive and cd drive (you can find that out from a mac specs site) and is pretty much factory specs from what I can tell by looking at it. Now here are the problems. The mac can't boot because it crashed. Does anyone know a easy way to get it at least to boot instaed of putting a floppy with a blinking qeustion amark in the middle of the srceen? Here is what I have to work with. I have a (running) windows xp (x86) with a cd-rw burner and no floppy drive. On this computer I have a mac emulator and all downloading would be though a xp computer. Every now and then I can get on another xp computer with a floppy drive. So if you missed it...."Does anyone know a easy way to get it at least to boot instaed of putting a floppy with a blinking qeustion amark in the middle of the srceen?"

Your situation is a little bit difficult. Do you not have any Mac OS system CDs or floppies at all? If you have a new enough Mac OS with a floppy drive you can try to make the Disk Tools floppy, but you may not be able to do that from what you have (you need to extract the MacBinary and then use Disk Tools to write it).

Then for installing Linux, with what you have, it may be really hard. Here's something you can try but probably will not work:
* go to here for the Debian 3.0 Mac install floppies and download the "boot-floppy-hfs.img" and "root.bin"
* follow these instructions to write the floppies using the rawrite tools for Windows which you can get from here
* first use the "boot-floppy-hfs.img" floppy to boot, if that works and it asks for the root floppy, give it the "root.bin" floppy
* then try to do a network install of Debian 3.0, including the quik bootloader
* the system might not be able to boot; then try tweaking Open Firmware settings (see here for more info on Open Firmware)

a floppy with a blinking qeustion amark in the middle of the srceen
AFAIK that's if it can't find the device to boot from. If it won't accept a CDR to boot from (my old world beige G3 for instance doesn't and your paperweight is slightly older than mine :-] ) then a floppy boot is the only fast alternative I see. You can get Mac OS 7.6 images for free (as in beer) from apple's ftp. Transfer images to floppies with winimage, rawrite or dd. As far as old world macs are concerned you'll need to boot Mac OS and run BootX from there to run Linux, and since Macs dont do OTF partitioning (nor does any Linux PPC installer) you'll have to reinstall Mac OS again anyway.

I haven't ever seen the 7.6 images. Can you link to them? I've tried writeing the network access disk image with winiamge(I don't think it would work for mine any way)and it gave me a message couldn't find header 0. I figured it couldn't take disc because I have made a bootable cd-r with 7.5.5 and it wouldn't take it (tested with a mac emulator).


Is there any why I can get it to a boot that can read cds with one floppy? (because from there I can burn what I need to a cd in the hfs format)

Where? I was aware that the latest free one was 7.5.5.

That's what I'm thinking too. But if he knows I'm really not going to saying anything. Or do you mean the disktools image? If so, still where please?

I proably could figure it out (if I ever get that far) but I won't be able to do a network install on it because I won't be able to netowrk it to my computer (which has dail up any how) but I would get one my friends (with high speed) to download and burn it for me.

Do you mean write evething in it to a floppy? if not explain a little because I have it up on the emulator.

I haven't ever seen the 7.6 images. (...) I was aware that the latest free one was 7.5.5.
Yes, you're right, last public one is 7.6.


BTW, "* the system might not be able to boot; then try tweaking Open Firmware settings" I thought thats why they are called "old world" Macs, since they don't have OF?

I wish they did because isn't that pretty much the mac's version of Bios?

Old World PowerPC PCI Macs have buggy implementations of OF 1.x or 2.x in their ROM. New World Macs have good OF 3 or better. The tweaks are detailed here and here.