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Feb 25th, 2009
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Mac won't boot to ISO disk

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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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grgreen is offline Offline
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Feb 25th, 2009
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Re: Mac won't boot to ISO disk

>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.
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John A is offline Offline
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Re: Mac won't boot to ISO disk

Click to Expand / Collapse  Quote originally posted by John A ...
>. 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.
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Feb 26th, 2009
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Re: Mac won't boot to ISO disk

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,
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grgreen is offline Offline
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Feb 27th, 2009
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Re: Mac won't boot to ISO disk

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.
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John A is offline Offline
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Re: Mac won't boot to ISO disk

Thanks for the tip
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