[ale] PPCQ: Trailing edge issues (longish - sorry)

[Tim Meanor]

Sounds more like a hardware issue to me.  I thought that if the Mac  
had a bad harddrive, it would attempt to boot from the CD.  At least  
an old 8600 that I had would do that.  Are you sure your CD and  
harddrive are cabled up correctly?  You may also need to reinitialize  
the harddrive as well.  If you are able to get to the point where you  
can boot off a CD, boot off the Mac OS 8.6 CD, go into Disk Utility  
(or whatever it was called in those days), and you should be able to  
format the drive, at least to the point that YDL can use it.  I've  
never actually installed YDL, but I've dealt with bad harddrives in  
Macs and installing new ones, though admittedly it's been a few years  
since I've done this with a pre-OSX Mac.  Hope all this provides at  
least a little bit of help.

-Tim

On Jul 26, 2006, at 1:06 PM, John Mills wrote:

> ALErs -
>
> I want to install Yellow Dog Linux in one of the old, 'Bondi blue'  
> G3-266
> iMacs and I am having trouble getting it to boot from the CD for
> installtion. I think I may have a recognized, but unusable boot sector
> from an aborted installation attempt. On startup, the box gives the
> patterned, gray boot screen with a small blinking '?' icon.  
> ('Unbootable
> drive' saith the manual.)
>
> I'm installing an old YDL-2.3 because the box has only 96MBy RAM,  
> with a
> plan to re-install something more current once I've scarfed some  
> cheap RAM
> (like, Fry's has it in stock). The CD is a direct burn of the  
> 'dayton' iso
> from a mirror.
>
> HDD is a 'generic' 11 GBy Maxtor ATA that never had Mac software.  
> It did
> have a VFAT filesystem and a Linux Reiser filesystem when I started  
> the
> project, which may be my problem. I could remove all existing  
> partitions
> by putting it into a generic PC and running 'fdisk' if that's the best
> answer, but the lazy engineer would rather not pull the drive  
> again. &8-)
>
> I do still have the original 4 GBy drive with its MacOS-9.x  
> untouched. I
> have tried the user-manual approaches of starting the box while  
> holding
> 'c' down, holding 'C' down, or while holding 'Ctrl/Shift/Command/ 
> Delete',
> to no avail. Neither of these will work with our faithful, working
> MacOS-8.6 iMac, either, so maybe I'm not using the right magic.
>
> If the internal 'boot from CD' setting does not require a valid HDD in
> place to boot I could use the old HDD to make that setting, then  
> put the
> new one back in to install YDL. That means pulling the &^%$!! HDD  
> twice,
> naturally.
>
> I also have the iMac CD set from the 8.6 box. Could I do a clean
> installation from them on [older] 'Bondi' before moving to YDL? I  
> have the
> same startup problem, though.
>
> Any suggestions from the PPC side of the Linux house?
>
> TIA.
>  - Mills
>
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