Maybe this translation will help, I don't know what the problem is, but this may allow more people to look at it.
This is a summary of our attempt to install debian on a mac. We have a grey mac G4 from 2002, from which we have taken out the harddrive and replaced it with an 6.4GB IDE disk from IBM, circa 1998. There is no floppy drive on this computer. We used the Debian Woody 3.0 r2 official install disks for powerpc downloaded from: http://ftp3.nrc.ca/debian-iso/cdimages/images/current/powerpc/ The procedure: - We formatted the disk and partitioned it with the Mac utility and erased all information on it. The verification produced nothing abnormal and we are able to copy files to the disk. The disk was attched at the end of the IDE cable and we set it to master, although we also tested with it's jumpers set to cable select as well. There are no other disks in the machine. - During the reboot after cleaning the memory? multiple times by using Alt-Apple-p-r, we pressed Alt-Apple-o-f to start openfirmware and entered the following command to boot from the CD-ROM with yaboot: > > boot cd:,install/powermac/yaboot - Yaboot started normally and we entered the following command to boot: > > install24 hda=12592,16,63 idebus=33 - The debian installer started fine, but when we ran dmesg on the second console, we noticed the following error indicating that the system hadn't detected the hard disk correctly. hda: , ATA Disk Drive ( the model of the disk was not identified contrary to what happens with MacOSX ) ... > hda: hda: status error: status=0x2 {DeviceFault} > hda: drive not ready for command > ide0: reset: master: error(0x0a?) ... and a long list of messages concerning the disk startup via end_request. - Worth noting is that unless you give the geometry(??) of the disk (The hda parameter) the system does not detect the presence of the disk and the debian installer refuses to start mac-fdisk. Conversly, changing the idebus parameter does not have any effect. - When we reach the partition step, mac-fdisk reports the following error: > Can't read block 0 from file (Input/output error) > no partition map exists (suite à la commande p) - We tried to create the partitions any by pressing: i, then b(for the bootstrap partition), following by many c's, and finally a w but mac-fdisk reported many errors: (can't write block ) After quitting mac-fdisk, the debian installer reports that it can't find the bootstrap partition and we can't go any further. Conclusion: The disk is fine, yaboot, the debian installer and mac-fdisk are also fine. (Lakin: I'm not completely sure about this next sentence.) We need to find a system which has the correct drivers for this disk We were directed to the following image: > http://penguinppc.org/~eb/files/boot-new-powermac-xfs.iso.bz2 Because we were told it would be able to use the IDE controller, however We cannot get the system booted using the openfirmware command: > > boot cd:,\boot\yaboot which produces a new error message. Because we don't have a floopy and and the hard disk is old, we don't see a solution for the mac. We are working on getting debian installed on a PC, but it's too bad that we couldn't get it installed on the Mac. > Olivier et Sophie
