My report on my attempt to boot an oldworld Mac from floppy is below... On Sat, 2004-04-10 at 02:36, Sven Luther wrote: > On Sat, Apr 10, 2004 at 01:24:27AM -0400, Rick_Thomas wrote: > > On Fri, 2004-04-09 at 14:28, Rick Thomas wrote: > > > > > Malte Cornils wrote: > > > > > > > > but I would appreciate it if someone > > > > could test the current images (Holger?) on similar hardware. > > > > > > > > > I'll test the latest daily-build boot floppies this weekend on both of > > > my test machines and send you a report. > > > > > > Sven and/or Colin: For this purpose, please tell me the location of the > > latest/greatest boot-floppy images. > > > http://people.debian.org/~luther/debian-installer/daily-powerpc-built/current/powerpc-small/floppy/ > > Friendly, > > Sven Luther
Well it appears I owe Malte an apology. There seems to have been a regression in the PowerMac boot floppies. I downloaded the five images in the above directory, and wrote each to a floppy. I thoroughly checked each floppy to make sure I got good writes. I tried booting both the "boot" and "ofonlyboot" floppies. They both booted OK. First the "happy mac" icon appeared for a few seconds, then it changed to an icon of Tux snuggling up to a classic mac. After a while, the boot floppy was ejected, but the Tux/Mac icon never went away. The last time I successfully booted from floppies, once the kernel had been completely loaded and was given control, the Tux/Mac icon was replaced by a text screen with a request to replace the boot floppy with the root floppy, and press return. This never happened this time around. Out of curiosity, I decided to test the theory that everything was going fine, but the kernel on the boot floppy (and, somewhat surprisingly, the ofonlyboot floppy as well) was somehow unable to talk to my video hardware. So, when the boot floppy was ejected, I inserted the root floppy and pressed the return key. Consistent with my theory, it read the root floppy for 30 seconds or so. Then it went silent (as if it had finished reading the floppy) but the tux/mac icon never went away, making it difficult for me to proceed further. Returning to the last time around: that time the boot floppy was not programmatically ejected. I had to manually eject it with a paper-clip. This time around, it was ejected without me doing anything. As I've pointed out before, this usually means the boot floppy was not completely read. However, it's possible that a programmed eject has been inserted before asking for the root floppy. Does anybody know if this is the case? Enjoy! Rick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
