corruption during install on powermac 6400

rajiv · Last edited by rajiv on Wed Aug 14, 2002 11:05 pm; edited 1 time in total

trying to install gentoo on a powermac 6400/200. pretty much a stock machine (603ev processor), 2.5 gig drive, 72 megs ram, apple cs ethernet card. i've added an ati xclaim vr card (rage II).

wiped the drive and installed macos 9.1 onto a 500mb partition. using bootx to start the build process. had to 'modprobe tulip' to get the ethernet card to work. followed the quickstart and install guide to create a 100mb partition for /boot, 150mb for swap, and the rest (about 1.6gb) for root.

before doing 'env-update', i have to 'emerge sync' as /etc/make.profile doesn't exist.

however, when i do the bootstrap, the process starts but fails with what looks like severe filesystem corruption. lots of ext2 errors, then the kernel hangs.

i've tried ext3 and ext2, no luck. running e2fsck right before the bootstrap shows no problems. though i haven't checked for bad blocks as the 'badblocks' command is not found when passing -c to e2fsck.

any ideas?

rajiv · Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2002 7:18 pm Post subject:

odd thing i noticed the third time i tried the install... i used apple's drive setup to create the 500mb macos partiion, leaving the rest of the space empty. then, during the gentoo install i used mac-fdisk to partition the drive. however, pmac-fdisk complains that the partition map is invalid and doesn't read it.

why would mac-fdisk have no trouble, but pmac-fdisk complain?

rajiv · Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2002 6:05 am Post subject: solved!

the problem was the way i created the partitions. originally i used mac-fdisk to create the linux partitions in free space. that turned out to be a bad idea (as suggested in docs on suse, penguinppc.org, etc). instead, i used apple's disk utility to make a large hfs partition which i then deteled using mac-fdisk. finally i created the linux partitions in its place.

no big trouble since then (except that there was a kernel panic during the linking of xfs.o the first time around).

but now, my powermac 6400 is up and running with gentoo!

Orphee · n00b Joined: 28 Jul 2002 Posts: 20 Location: France

Congratulation !
But didn't you remember ? That's exactly what I told to you on IRC... Make a BIG HFS partition with the Disk Utilitie from the MacOS 9 CD-ROM, and then destroy it with mac-fdisk, and recreate your linux partitions is this new free space... :-)

rajiv · Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2002 2:10 pm Post subject:

yup, i just posted the answer here in the forums so those without irc would benefit from our conversation. thanks!

Yarrick · Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 8:54 pm Post subject:

i have the same problem with my powermac 7600.

i have two scsi disks, one with macos, one to hold linux. i formatted the second one from within macos, and then deleted the HFS partition with mac-fdisk and created ext3 and swap partitions in the free space. it doesnt work. do i have to use some special rescue-cd app to make it work?

Gerk · Retired Dev Joined: 07 May 2002 Posts: 435

Nothing special needs to happen AFAIK. It sounds like you might not have ext3 support turned on in your kernel (?) I would double check that and/or try a different filesystem, ext2 is saafest to test with.

Yarrick · Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2002 7:51 am Post subject:

i have tried with both ext2 and ext3. and since i can mount the ext3 partition, ext3 is supported.