well, here's an update to my problem, I've found the solution, so I'm going to send it out here, in the hopes that someone may stumble across it in the future.
first of all, here's a link to the page with the answer on it, however it's not where I saw the answer, as I overlooked it... http://www.mfdh.ca/~mfdh/apple/#oldworld_potato note that his installation instructions work perfectly for woody. here's the page where I actually noticed what I had missed: http://www.imaclinux.net/gh.php?single=81 this page is also very useful, however, for a first time install, I would go w the first one, as it's a bit more n00b friendly. what I missed was that there is a leading space in the boot-file variable. I don't know why it would cause the boot to work once, and then not again, but putting it in solved my problem. I now have the powercenter sitting with only the power cable and the ethernet cable plugged into it, no monitor, no keyboard and no mouse. I'm happy. for reference, here are the open firmware settings that worked for me: boot-device "scsi/[EMAIL PROTECTED]:0" boot-file " scsi/[EMAIL PROTECTED]:3/boot/vmlinux-2.4.18-powerpc" boot-command "begin ['] boot catch 1000 ms cr again" according to the second link, I could have made the settings more generic, as long as I copied my kernel over to /vmlinux, but as I'm new to linux, I didn't want to do anything too fancy. I know that if I change my kernel, I'll have to modify the boot-file variable to match. and now you know that too :) again, if anyone wants more of the info I found, just let me know, I'd be happy to compile it into a how-to or something. I hope that this helps someone. take care, --wylie oh, and as far as getting that IDE drive recognized, the new kernel saw the PCI card, so all I had to do was partition it, format it and mount it :) -----Original Message----- From: Wylie Graham Rothstein [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 03:45 PM To: debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org Subject: the trials and tribulations of getting woody on my powercenter 120 I've been working on getting woody installed on an old powercenter 120. My goal is for it to be a stand alone ftp server, running only debian, with no macos, no monitor, no kybd or mouse. (I'm going to be co-locating it once I have everything running properly, so I need it to be able to boot up unattended) I've done a ton of research, and thanks to the help of many web pages, got debian installed. (if there is any interest in it, I can list the most useful sites I hit, as the documentation for the install is a little light when it comes to problem child old-world machines like this one.) I've almost got the machine booting properly, but it's just not quite there. I haven't got the appropriate cabling, so I can't get a terminal session to open firmware, and as this particular machine has a buggy OF implementation (big surprise, right...) I can't use my monitor to view the OF environment at boot. I've been using the boot/root disk combo to get the installer running, then I execute a shell, and from ash, I can enter commands through nvsetenv to make the changes I want to OF. here's what I have it set to, where it will actually boot: boot-device "/bandit/gc/53c94/[EMAIL PROTECTED]:3" boot-file "/bandit/gc/53c94/[EMAIL PROTECTED]:3/boot/vmlinux-2.4.18-powerpc" boot-command "boot linux" after entering these parameters into OF, I reboot. the machine chimes, then chimes again, then, after a brief pause, the monitor comes up, and I'm into the os. after logging into debian, I run nvsetenv to double check the settings, and everything is how I left it. the only problem is that if I tell the system to reboot, it fails to do so. it just sits there with a blank monitor, and even if I wait a while, I can't ping it, so I know it hasn't booted. at this point, I have to zap the pram to get it to boot from a floppy, go back into the installer, drop to ash, reset the variables in OF and then I tell the installer to reboot the system. it chimes twice, and then I'm in linux again. I'm using quik as a bootloader, and my quik.conf is properly configured, and I've upgraded the kernel to 2.4.18-powerpc from 2.2.20 as I would like to have the system see the promise ata 100 card I installed along with a 60gb hd. getting those to show up is another problem, but it's one I haven't researched yet; if you happen to know how to get linux to see a pci card, and get the drive mounted, feel free to let me know, but I'm going to do the legwork first before I actually come begging for help :) any help/advice to solving this problem would be greatly appreciated. thank you --wylie
