Note: If you want to use woody boot-floppies as Ethan suggests, you can get them at your local mirror in /debian/dists/woody/main/disks-powerpc . There's no CD image, so instead you'll have use MacOS and Open Firmware to set up yaboot and the ramdisk image. Once you boot the woody install disks, I think you can use your potato CD as the source medium (Ethan, will this work?).
See "6.3 Booting from a Hard Disk" in this document: http://www.debian.org/releases/2.2/powerpc/ch-rescue-boot.en.html Before you try this, it's probably worth trying a few simple things to fix your mostly-complete potato install: >> If you boot from the installation disk again and start the installer, >> you can then switch to the second virtual console (type command-F2 >> ... or was it the third console?) and get a shell. You can then >> mount your root partition and try to see what's wrong. > > my knowledge so far does include opening a shell from the installer. > and i assume my redhat linux and linux for dummies books have info on > mounting. but would you mind spelling it out (mounting), and what i > should look for once i've mounted it? thanks. You can use the installer's menu system to mount your root partition. It mounts it in /target or /mnt/target (I can't remember which). Now (working within the target volume), check for the /vmlinux symlink. Using 'ls -l' see where that link points (should be to the kernel in /boot), then check that file to see that it exists. If it doesn't, try re-running the "Install Operating System Kernel" step from the installer. Now go back to the shell and run the mkofboot command again, checking all the arguments (especially the --root device). Now reboot. If this doesn't work, I would just go to the woody boot-floppies. They have a working "Make Bootable from Harddrive" step that eliminates the need to run ofpath and mkofboot by hand.
