I've just purchased a powerbook 17". I've tried (unsuccessfully)
installing debian using various howtos on the Net. I managed to get the
machine to boot and run the installer using the recent "boot-floppies"
in the woody distro, but the installer had problems finding any hard
disks. I decided to extract the kernel from the 2.4.20 deb package and
give that a go. It works better in that the hard disk is now
recognisable and I have managed to partition it and initialise the
partitions using mke2fs and mkswap :)
Unfortunately the installer still doesn't recognise any partitions to
mount, neither swap nor linux partitions. One thing I noticed which was
different to previous installs I've performed on earlier model
powerbooks and powermacs is that the hard disk is /dev/hdc and the
dvd/cd is /dev/hda. I always have experienced it being the other way
around. Could this be a problem during manufactur of the powerbook?
ie. hard disk plugged into secondary master and dvd/cd plugged into
primary master IDE interface by mistake or is this the way all new
powerbooks come? Maybe it's something to do with booting dvds???
Anyway, I assume the new installer doesn't search for mount partitions
on /dev/hdc, and if so, needs to be fixed (especially if my setup is the
norm).
Any ideas where to go from here???
For some reason I can't nfs mount an intel box to copy my backup fs to
my new partitions. wget fails too. I think this is because the .tgz
file is 3.1GB and the busybox version of wget is not so capable. I have
a macosx partition so I should be able to copy the file to it and
hopefully I might be able to find a ext2/3 driver for macos so I can
unarchive the .tgz files to my linux partition. Any one know of such a
driver ???
Please CC to me as well as the list.
Many thanks,
Brendan Simon.
