Corrupted boot G5 iMac

[Dashh]

I installed Debian PPC on my G5iMac and although it seemed to install , when I rebooted it would only go half way through the booting process and hang. It was using yaboot. No matter what else I did it would insist on defaulting to the same thing,yaboot on the hard drive. I
It will not boot from any DVD I tried ( Mac install, Ubuntu PPC, ) In fact it does not seem to be able to read the optical dirve although that drive has been perfect. I tried holding down ALT/Option, "C", shift/command, no difference. Yaboot says to hold down the "c" for the optical dirive but nothing helps, always goes back to the main hard drive.,starts ro load and then hangs. I hooked up an external drive but how do I access it? If I give up on the optical drive and try a USB port, how do I access that from Yaboot? Is there some thing like Disk Warrior that the computer recognize right off the bat? Can I force it to recognize something from Yaboot?

Looking for help !........Dashh

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Is there a Debian forum you can use because you need specific help with this & I'm not sure anyone here has direct knowledge about what you are doing.

Other than that your first step is to boot from the install disk for whichever Mac OS X system you had installed prior to this issue, insert the disk then reboot holding Command (⌘) C. When it's loaded (which will take some time) go to the Utilities menu and choose Disk Utility & run Repair Disk. If this is able to correct any errors you should then try to install from the disk.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Spawn_Dooley is right on the money here. I am not sure anyone has experience with that particular flavor of Debian port or Yaboot. I did a little research, and there are a couple of Debian help sites: debianHELP and Debian User Forums. There is also the HOWTO-Booting with Yaboot on PowerPC site. The system requirements show the following: "The NewWorld PowerMacs, for which yaboot is designed, are any PowerMacs in translucent colored plastic cases. That includes all iMacs, iBooks, G4 systems, blue colored G3 systems, and most PowerBooks manufactured in and after 1999." Maybe there is an issue there?

I do know there are installs of similar ports and bootloaders available for the 64-bit G5, versus the 32-bit G3/G4 Macs. It is just way beyond my personal experience.

Sorry,

C