G4 and no Mac OS - will it work?! :)

[skibtz]

Hi

I have a powermac g4 (tower) 400mhz single processor with no OS installed at all

there is a 40gb Maxtor DiamondMax ATA 133 HDD

gentoo does not see the hdd when I do lspci and it did not find it when there was os 9.2.2 on the hdd

I have tried a few other hdds and they are not found either

does the hdd need to be initialised by the Mac OS?

I do not have any mac os cds so this could be a problem

ideally all i want is the G4 running Gentoo and no Mac OS

thanks

[NewBlackDak]

Yes Gentoo works fine without MacOS installed.

If nothing sees the HD though it sounds like you have a hardware problem.

When you boot the LiveCD what does it show when you "mac-fdisk /dev/hda"?
_________________
Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy

[skibtz]

lo

when i use mac-fdisk /dev/hda i get :

hda1 - which is the 1k apple map

hda2 - which is the cd-rom

have tried several hdds but to no avail

what does happen is that on boot my 17" lcd cannot display the "out of range" resolution so i do not get to choose the kernal which is fine because g4 is the default so it boots through and ends up at the livedcd prompt

is there any particular process i should put the hdd through to prepare it

i can slave it to a pc and do any required formatting etc

many thanks for your time and help

[mox2k]

[skibtz]

Ok

The cd is connected via the IDE socket

The Maxtor Diamond ATA/133 is connected via the Ultra ATA socket

The HDD was working perfectly fine - I tried installing Gentoo with the OS still there but I still had the same problem of not seeing the HDD.

lspci brings up :

0000:00:00.0 - Host bridge: Motorola MPC106 [Grackle] (rev 40)
0000:00:0d.0 - PCI bridge: Digital Equipement Corporation DECchip 21154 (rev 02)
0000:00:10.0 - VGA compatible controller: ATI Tech Inc Rage 128 RE/SG
0000:01:00.0 - Firewire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCILynx/PCILynx2 IEEE 1394 link cont. (rev 04)
0000:01:01.0 - IDE controller: Silicon image Inc (formerly CMD Tech Inc) PCI 0646 (rev 07)
0000:01:04.0 - *SCSI Storage Controller: Adaptec AHA-7850 (rev03)
0000:01:05.0 - Class ff00: Apple Corp. Inc. PAddington Mac I/O
0000:01:06.0 - USB Controller: OPTi Inc. 82C861 (rtev 10)

*I have tried without the SCSI controller.

mac-fdisk brings up

hda1 - Apple Map (1k)

hda2 - Gentoo LIveCD (309mb)

Now - I used the 'eject' command to get the cd out and then trying using mac-fdisk again but until the cd is placed back in it will not work so I assume this means that hda is definately my cd drive.

Is there a way of changing the boot cd so that the resolution is adjusted at the first boot promt where you choose g3,g4 or g5? Or is this a red herring as it defaults to g4 anyway?

Many thanks for your time and help mox2k

[skibtz]

more accurately :

/dev/hda1 Apple_partition_map Apple 2 @ 1 (1.0k) Partition Map

/dev/hda2 Apple HFS Gentoo LiveCD 2005.0 ppc 633200 @ 16 (309.2m) HFS

Block size = 512 number of blocks 633216
DeviceTyupe=0x1, DeviceId=0x1


Hdd is set to Cable Select on the Ultra ATA socket
CD is set to Master (and at the end of the cable) on the IDE socket

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Many thanks

Martin

[JoseJX]

In this case, hda1 is the partition map which describes the partition layout for mac partition. hda is your CD drive, hda2 is the partition that contains the data on the LiveCD. (Hope that clears things up a little for you)

As for the device not being seen, are you sure that the controller in the Mac is working correctly? Are you using a pci controller or is it the one on the mainboard? Also, we may not have included the driver for the CMD64X on the LiveCD, you may need to use another PCI IDE card. If we did include the driver, you'll almost certainly need to modprobe the module for it (cmd64x).

Good luck!

[skibtz]

hi JoseJX

all i have using the pci are the graphics and scsi controller i may use for a scanner (i have removed this for now)

the hdd is connected directly to the board in the ultra ata socket

the hd was working fine with os9.2 (the entire 40GB was allocated) - i tried to install gentoo with os9.2 still there but the hdd was still not found

i removed the hdd and placed in a pc box - cleared all the partitions and created a new 20gb partition (unformatted) and left the remaing 20gb unpartitioned

Should/could I format the hdd in a pc box to prepare it? This sounds a little naive though because regardless of the formatting and partitions I still cant see it in the Mac

Can i reset the bios on the Mac (sorry, im more a pc/windows person at the moment - hoping to change that though )

I have no Mac OS cds and no macos installed

thanks

[JoseJX]

There is no real equivalent to the PC bios on the Mac. Like I said in my previous post, the problem most likely is that the IDE controller you're using isn't built into the LiveCD kernel. If we provided the module (which I'm not sure of) you will need to modprobe the module in order to see the devices on your IDE bus.

[skibtz]

Ok

Some Success

I reset the PRAM/VRAM on the Mac - this reset the video so that my 17" LCD is now able to view the first part of the boot sequence (blue screen and kernel options)

wohoo

I used modprobe and couldnt find cmd64x or anything like it - which file would i need to download that would have it on?

thanks again