confused about install

kohi · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2004 Posts: 7

trying to boot from a live cd on an old powerbook g4 15" 500mhz
which is the first apple i've really used at all since the IIgs-

when i boot with the option key it will recognize both my resident drive and the gentoo boot cd along with the refresh and forward arrows.

however when i click on the liveCD and try to progress- the screen will just flash and i am presented with the same options again- however the color bitrate seems to drop.

soo what do i do?

bruda · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 5:37 pm Post subject:

Hi.

Did you try booting off the CD by pressing C during startup? I cannot explain the behaviour of Option booting reported by you, so this is just a shot in the dark (but then it may help, hopefully).
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kohi · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2004 Posts: 7

pindar · Apprentice Joined: 30 Apr 2004 Posts: 220

I may be off the mark here, but I had similar problems long ago. When you hold the option key, open firmware checks bootable partitions. What you see as the linux icon really is just the yaboot bootloader which is recognized by OF. Once this gets booted, it will try and hand over the boot process to your linux kernel. If there are kernel options and/or modules not compatible with your hardware, the boot process will abort at some point; in your case, this point seems to be quite early. So the long and shoirt of it is that the livecd doesn't seem to working with your powerbook. Is this a 2004.2 one? Many people had problems with those.

kohi · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2004 Posts: 7

ah right- that would be what the big Y is under the CD icon
was wondering about that.

anyway- it's 2004.1 as i read 2004.2 causes lots of problems...
are older versions available to try?

porodzila · Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 9:07 pm Post subject:

the cd might be burnt incorrectly. I think it ought to boot on that hardware, I have hardware from the same period and it works fine. maybe at the yaboot prompt try

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

I have the exact same machine and it does boot correctly with the 2004.1 CD. I would try to ensure that the CD was burnt correctly and that the ISO downloaded correctly.

Good luck!

kohi · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2004 Posts: 7

finally got it booting -

thanks for all the help

of course now i'm confused about whether or not i'll be able to partition the drive and keep my OSX/9 install on there rather than backing up all my data and partitioning from the OSX disc

sadly
i am lost

linuxopjemac · Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2004 8:39 am Post subject:

Sorry, but I did not see your message about the fact that you succeeded in booting....

I can also confirm that this machine boots from the 2001.1 LiveCD as I did exactly the same thing (on the 400 MHz version, which is the same machine as you have, but yours is clocked higher).

So you have to burn the CD correctly and then press "c" while booting.

Good ways to burn an image is by using Disk utiliy under Panther/Jaguar. Just select "burn image". Don't use Toast for this kinda work. Or try to burn on a Windows machine with Nero. Or use the good old cdrecord under Linux, which works as well.

Good luck