Powerbook G4 15" not booting Linux DVD's or CD's
 

I Have a Powerbook G4, with Leopard 10.5.1 on it and well...

Well i knew i would get beaten eventually at the linux game,

but it seems that since i tried to get linux on my Powerbook G4 15" 1.33Ghz model. 2GB of DDR, i have already been nocked back with the problem were i cannot boot ANY PPC linux distro on this damn laptop EXCEPT suse 10.1. they all will read the cd or dvd and then go to a grey screen were yaboot should appear and then nothing will appear. I have tried holding OPT at boot to select the startup device., this didnt work same result. i have also tried to boot using the CMD-OPT-SHIFT-DELETE method and this also didnt work. and yes the classical 'c' on boot method never works on this machine at all for some reason.

I can however, get ALL OSX DVD's to work, 10.3 , 10.4 , 10.5.

Booting into Openfirmware mode works but i cant force to boot from the cd there either, i would really like to use another distro other than this version of Suse??

So am am completly baffled as to why this machine refuses to boot any other distro but suse, unless anyone else can think of anything to get the damn think to boot i would be greatful.

Well i am running gentoo on my powerbook 15" 1.5ghz computer and it works just perfect (after some sleepless nights of course).

All i did to boot gentoo minimal cd was, that i just downloaded the gentoo-2007.0-minimal cd image for 32-bit ppc architecture, then burned it using open source cd/dvd burning program for OS X called "Burn", then opened gentoo handbook for ppc machines and that was it, i got into the gentoo cli, followed instructions there, have been reading manuals, and as of now i have fully functioning linux in my powerbook.

And as of other distributions, maybe you just burning those cd's in the wrong format? as far as i know mac's can't boot from other than mac formatted disks.

Thanks for the thoughts there Affromen, all the discs i am using have been burnt on a pc machine, though i did use to have a PPC based mac mini, but i cant recall wether those discs work on that machine or not.

But i might try downloading and burning these images on the mac itself, but im not sure about that working 100% cause i still remember loading debian on the PPC mac mini and they worked?

But its a great idea and will try it and post the results

Well it seems that i cant get it to boot at all..

I tested the other discs on a Ibook G3 and they booted fine.. so i am baffled? may be it is the the drive im not sure, but i will redownload gentoo and see. but the only one that boots is Suse 10.1 :-(

problem has been solved, temporarily...

It seems the problem does lie with the superdrive, it seems the drive does not work very well as a boot drive in older machines. It does work in my Mac-mini C2D as a boot drive and all fuctions. However it does not work correctly in my Older Powerbook G4 (A1095). I will have to get hold of the Proper Matshita Drive for this model to use it efficiently.

So when i replaced the combo drive back in to the powerbook that was in it originally, it works like a charm.

Crazy but will have to cope till i can get a drive :-) thanks for the thoughts