On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 04:56:56AM -0700, Johan en Katrien Dewaele wrote: > Hi people, > I need your help/advice on this one : I'm a newbie in > this PPC-Linux thing. > > I acquired this old Mac PPC 4400/200 with 1.2 GB HD > with Mac OS 7.5.3 installed on it. Would like to put > Debian/GNU Linux - Woody on this machine AND would > like to keep the Mac OS + installed software. > > So I plugged in a second HD of 4.3 GB as slave on > first IDE intending to place Linux on this disk. CD > is master on second IDE. (Similar as on my intel-PC) > > Used floppies and downloaded-base-tarball to install > (version 3.0.23 ). I partitioned second HD : > hdb1= partition table > hdb2= Linux system (2 GB) > hdb3= swap 160 (MB) > hdb4= free for now > > > Debian-installer goes OK until I want to make the > system bootable : > > - first I choose make bootable from HD (wanting to use > quik) : Error : root must be on the first disk. > - second I choose make boot-floppy : boot floppies > can't be made. > - third I choose reboot system : installed BootX on > the Mac OS partition, copied linux.bin in the > BootX-kernel-map, choose /dev/hdb2 as root-device and > choose Linux as OS. > > So when I now try to boot using this > BootX-configuration: kernel boots, the 2 HD + CD are > detected, partition check goes ok but when the kernel > wants to mount root fs I get following error : > Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:40. > Rebooting in 180 seconds. > > I relaunched the installer with the floppies and here > I CAN mount /dev/hdb2 on /target. > > What am I missing? Are there any other kernel > parameters I should add ?
Thanks for applying all the wisdom available in the manual and so on before writing! The make a boot floppy step does not work at all in the installer for powerpc. You can use a perl script to modify your boot floppy image, though, to substitute /dev/hdb for the ramdisk root: http://cvs.debian.org/powerpc-specials/miBoot/patch-floppy-image.pl Or you can use ResEdit under MacOS to patch the System file, in the cmdl resource - that would be on an actual floppy. Another option is to make a small (say 80MB) partition on your master drive to serve as your root partition, leaving /var, /usr, and /home on the other disk. Then apparently quik will be happy. But with your current setup, it's apparent that it's only the file system it's having a problem with; BootX has suceessfully launched linux, and the partitions are correctly detected. So it seems unlikely another booting system will help that. One thing to try is to just run e2fsck /dev/hdb from within the installer shell. -- *------v--------- Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 --------v------* | <http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual> | | debian-imac: <http://debian-imac.sourceforge.net> | | Chris Tillman [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | To Have, Give All to All (ACIM) | *----------------------------------------------------------------*