Member Avatar for grgreen

My goal: install Ubuntu on my old PowerMac G4

What I did so far:
I replaced the hard drive (it was fired) with a new unformatted hard drive. I was planning on formatting it with the linux install.

The problem:
I can't get the computer to boot to the optical drive. When I hold down "c" at startup it does nothing. The same result when I hold down "shift, command, option, delete" Both these result in the computer going to the screen that toggles between the osx icon and a question mark.

When I tap the option button when I boot it will load the options page, but it does not see the CD as a boot option.

I know the linux iso disk is good because my new Macbook will boot to it just fine when holding down "c".

Any ideas? Could it have to do with the fact that the hard drive is not formatted with anything? I wouldn't think that would cause it, but who knows. Not an expert when it comes to Mac.

Thanks for any help!

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Member Avatar for John A

>I know the linux iso disk is good because my new Macbook will boot to it
Then of course it won't boot on your PowerMac. MacBooks use a completely different architecture than the old PowerPC chips; you'll need to download a PowerPC version of Ubuntu for that to work on your PowerMac.

Member Avatar for grgreen

>. MacBooks use a completely different architecture than the old PowerPC chips; you'll need to download a PowerPC version of Ubuntu for that to work on your PowerMac.

Doh! Definitely wasn't thinking on that one. I'll try to find a PowerPC distro and give that a try tonight. Thanks.

Member Avatar for grgreen

OK. I successfully booted up to the PPC version of Ubuntu however I'm now having another problem.

It starts the installation but when it gets to the "Detect and mount CD-ROM" section it says it can't detect the CD-ROM. Which is a bit frustrating since the install is running of the CDROM. It tells me load a floppy with the correct drivers which I don't have, or it tells me to manually select the correct files if I have a non-SCSI or non-IDE CDROM, which I don't have.

Any ideas on getting it to detect the CDROM?? It also won't let me skip this part of the install. It just fails.

Thanks,

Member Avatar for John A

I think there's a thread in the Linux section created a few weeks ago about this same issue; apparently Ubuntu has some issues with booting from the CD on older Macs. My suggestion would be to look on search engines, chances are you can find the issue documented somewhere, and if that doesn't work, you can try adding

acpi=off noacpi

to the kernel parameters before Ubuntu boots to see if ACPI support is causing your problems.

Member Avatar for grgreen

Thanks for the tip

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