On 3/26/22 2:16 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > Hello! > > On 3/26/22 04:06, Stan Johnson wrote: >> 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. > > You are missing the HFS partition that gets mounted to /boot/grub. You > either used one of the older, broken images or you ignored the warning > during partitioning that a system without /boot/grub won't be able to > boot.
I used the image from your 18 Mar 2022 message: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2022-03-18/non-free/ > >> 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). > > What image did you use? > >> 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. > > GRUB does not use the Apple_Bootstrap partition. It uses an HFS filesystem > that gets mounted to /boot/grub. You cannot get a bootable system without > that partition. AFAIK, GRUB needs to use Apple_Bootstrap (how else will Open Firmware know how to boot?). And the Apple_Bootstrap partition is formatted as HFS (but "Apple_Bootstrap" instead of "Apple_HFS" so Mac OS won't access it). > >> 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. > > It's because GRUB is not installed onto the Apple_Bootstrap partition. > PReP partitions are used on IBM machines among other systems but not > on Apple machines. Yes, I understand. I didn't choose to use a PReP partition; that was the error message from the GRUB installation. > >> Please let me know of anything else that I could try. > > What image did you use? Please reference the URL. https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2022-03-18/non-free/ > > And if you used the correct image, what steps did you perform? I booted the installation image and chose a default installation. > Did you run in expert mode? I could imagine that expert mode turns off all > warnings and therefore it didn't tell you when your manual partitioning > resulted in an unusable partition layout. In my second test (step 3 from my earlier message) I chose a default installation and told the partitioner to use the entire disk. The installer repartitioned the disk to contain the following partitions: 1: /dev/sda1 - partition map 2: /dev/sda2 - Apple_Bootstrap (hfs, 256 MB) 3) /dev/sda3 - Debian rootfs (ext4, ~110 GB) 4) /dev/sda4 - Linux swap (swap, ~768 MB) > > Adrian >
