OK. Thanks to the command-line ideas from Jeroen and Cedar, I was able to
get much further (plus I know how to get into the command-line now! Yay!),
but I'm not exactly sure what caused it to finally see the USB stick for
the Installation media step.
The installation seemed to go OK and finish OK, but on restart, the iMac
will not boot. I get the Mac icon that means bootable media cannot be found.
I'm guessing maybe I made a partitioning mistake or a partitioning quirk or
grub?
Here is my partitioning setup:
LVM VG vg1, LV lv1 - 398.5 MB Linux device-mapper (linear)
#1 398.5 MB f ext2 /boot
LVM VG vg1, LV lv2 - 398.5 MB Linux device-mapper (linear)
#1 398.5 MB f HFS /boot/grub
LVM VG vg1, LV lv3 - 75.2 GB Linux device-mapper (linear)
#1 75.2 GB f ext4 /
LVM VG vg1, LV lv4 - 4.0 GB Linux device-mapper (linear)
#1 4.0 GB f swap swap
SCSI2 (0,0,0) (sda) - 80.0 GB ATA WDC WD800J-40GB
#1 32.3 kB Apple <----------------------------------------
bet this is the problem? I should have deleted this first?
#2 80.0 GB K lvm untitled
25.1 kB FREE SPACE
SCSI6 (0,0,0) (sdb) - 4.0 GB General UDisk <-------- my thumb drive
If the USB doesn't work this time, I need to dig through a filled-up cave
for blank CD-R, DVD-R, or DVD+R discs (Thanks, Ken!). Hopefully, the
CD/(DVD?) drive will work.
The Built-in Ethernet hardware is apparently bad, and MacOSX still would
not recognize either, but the Debian Installation did recognize the Apple
USB-to-Ethernet dongle.
Anyway, please offer any advice on where I may have messed up, so I can get
this thing booting.
BTW, any recommendations for a lightweight GUI to install? I need this
machine mostly for gcc (some g++) and TCP/IP and thread programming, gdb,
SSH/SCP.
Thank you!
On Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 7:53 AM Joe Flowers <[email protected]>
wrote:
> On the “Detect and mount installation media” step, I get, “Your
> installation media couldn’t be mounted. “
>
> I burned debian-12.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso on a 4GB USB drive with
> rufus-4.9p.exe. Rufus said it had to use the dd method.
>
> When the iMac G5 is booted up with Mac OS X Version 10.5.8, I can see and
> browse the USB drive and read text files on it.
>
> I can boot to the USB drive with Federico Vaga’s excellent post (
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2024/02/msg00007.html => boot
> usb0/disk@1:,\boot\grub\powerpc.elf), and the Debian installation seems
> to proceed fine until I get to this error.
>
> “Your installation media couldn’t be mounted... “ “Retry mounting
> installation media?”
>
> I have not been able to get the Built-in Ethernet port nor a USB to
> Ethernet dongle to work when booted in Mac OS X, but I was hoping the
> Debian installation media could work with either of those two Ethernet
> hardware options. I do not have a WiFi card in this iMac G5, apparently.
>
> Any ideas, please?
>
> ---
>
> debian-12.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso
> SHA256: 1483ae25b215e69cbd2268b4aa58b23bc7f5522f6fc5697213af39cee6704c50
>
> rufus-4.9p.exe
> SHA256: 497f796e6d076d4855d697965c04626e6d3624658fce3eca82ab14f7414eede2
>
> ---
>
>
