Completely erase the hard drive, until you have a totally blank disk, with no partitions whatsoever on it.
To do this, I mounted the HD using Firewire disc mode from another system, and formatted it until it was bare. Then let the CD installer ISO take care of doing everything. Let it use the whole disk mode. Don’t try to outsmart it in any way. Don’t use manual anything. Success should follow. Ken > > Hello, > > My installation attempt using CD [2] above on a PowerBook G3 Pismo (500 > MHz; 2 GiB memory) failed. > > 1) I started with a blank 120 GB disk. I partitioned the disk to include > partitions (after the Apple drive partitions) for Apple_Bootstrap > (/dev/sda6; 10 MiB), Mac OS 9 (/dev/sda7; 1 GiB), Mac OS X (/dev/sda8; 7 > GiB), Debian rootfs (/dev/sda9; 16 GiB), and swap (/dev/sda10; 2 GiB) -- > I left the rest of the disk un-partitioned. > > 2) The installation CD booted and GRUB worked. I chose a default > installation with manual partitioning, using the partitions I set up in > step 1. Everything worked as expected until GRUB installation, which > failed. The error message was that GRUB failed to install on /dev/sda9 > (the rootfs, not the Apple_Bootstrap, partition). > > 3) In step 2, I thought it might have failed because my Apple_Bootstrap > partition could have been too small, so I tried the installation again, > choosing a default installation using the entire disk with only the > default partitions. The resulting sizes were approximately as follows: > Apple_Bootstrap (/dev/sda2; 256 MB); Debian rootfs (/dev/sda3; ~115 > GiB); and swap (/dev/sda4; ~768 MB). So this Apple_Bootstrap was > certainly larger than the one I used in step 1, and I was optimistic > that everything would work. But GRUB installation failed again, with the > error message that "grub-install /dev/sda3" failed. Even if this had > worked, it appears that I would have lost the Apple drivers needed to > boot Mac OS 9. > > 4) Booting into rescue mode on the installation CD, I was also not able > to install GRUB on the Apple_Bootstrap partition directly (e.g. after > step 3, I tried "grub-install /dev/sda2"). The error message was that > the partition was not a partition of type PReP. > > Please let me know of anything else that I could try. > > thanks > > -Stan Johnson >
