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Powerbook A1085 no USB Boot possible

M

monkeyisland

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 22, 2020
23
4
Germany
So i don't know what is happening on this machine
I got PB G4 17 A1052 with openfirmware 4.8.6
I can't get this machine to boot from usb stick.
several stick i tried.
The strange the same stick boots fine in a A1138 Powerbook
The stick is shown in openfirmware
dev usb1 ok
ls
ff9d64d8: /disk@1

But when i try to boot with

boot usb1/disk@1:,\\yaboot

nothing happens i wait 10 minutes nothing

even

dir usb1/disk@1:,\

the system hang and shows nothing...

tried reset-nvram and reset-all

can i copy the .iso to a empy partition to my harddrive ?
and boot the installer from the ubuntu-remix 16.04 properly ?
I tried but i get the error /dev/sr0 not found ...
 
Which OS are you trying to boot from usb ? And how did you "burn" the stick with an OS, and on what platform/OS ? These are all important bits and may be causing the issue.

I was gonna say try this : boot usb1/disk@1:,\\:tbxi but if the dir command hangs then there's not much hope.

I'm pretty sure you know this, but Powerbooks are VERY picky when it comes to working with usb sticks, my 12" G4 Powerbook refuses to boot from 5 out of 6 usb sticks - luckily one of them appeared to be accepted (the only one that has a flashing red led on it, icing - or rather, cherry on the cake ^^)
 
i "burned" the stick on a linux machine via the dd command.
The strange is that the stick boot from my A1138 fine.
evtl.
you can give a hint to boot from hd ?
I unzip the iso to hfs+ partition.
then i tried to boot
hd:6,\install\yaboot

yaboot appers
then i tried to boot the label from yaboot.conf
linux-powerpc-nosplash
boots fine boot then i get an error that the device /dev/sr0 is not responding.

evtl. i can edit the label :

mage=/casper/powerpc/vmlinux
label=live
alias=live-powerpc
initrd=/casper/powerpc/initrd
append="file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-mate.seed boot=casper quiet splash ---"
initrd-size=1048576
read-only

but how i can boot the iso / from hd ?
 
monkeyisland said:
So i don't know what is happening on this machine
I got PB G4 17 A1052 with openfirmware 4.8.6
Click to expand...
Hmm. I don't have a dump of 4.8.6. According to https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...l-work-in-a-beige-power-macintosh-g3.2303689/ , automatic USB boot support was removed after 4.8.5 and before 4.8.7.

Maybe you can provide a firmware dump for examination.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ok.2446804/page-4?post=33707915#post-33707915
This post has links discussing the USB boot issue:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/powermac-g5-boot-issue.2450010/post-33757059

monkeyisland said:
I can't get this machine to boot from usb stick.
several stick i tried.
The strange the same stick boots fine in a A1138 Powerbook
Click to expand...
What Open Firmware version does the A1138 Powerbook have?
 
FWIW there's a table with OF vs Mac model here.

I just checked the OF version on my 2004 Alu PBook, it's on 4.8.3f1 (see pic below), so before automatic usb boot support was apparently removed. Yet never got any "automatic" boot, gotta enter OF and then type the proper command to boot from usb.

Having said that, the boot picker does show the usb as a bootable object, so that's another (simpler) way to boot from usb, however in my case i've coded a simple script that allows me to choose which OS I want to reboot next and from which source, including from usb. ( well, actually that was working great with yaboot, before I installed Void Linux which brought grub with it, need to work on how to have the script deal with grub, if that's possible at all, not really sure from what I've read :-/ ).

PBook Open Firmware pic.jpg
 
Last edited:
Alubook133 said:
FWIW there's a table with OF vs Mac model here.

I just checked the OF version on my 2004 Alu PBook, it's on 4.8.3f1 (see pic below), so before automatic usb boot support was apparently removed. Yet never got any "automatic" boot, gotta enter OF and then type the proper command to boot from usb.

Having said that, the boot picker does show the usb as a bootable object, so that's another (simpler) way to boot from usb, however in my case i've coded a simple script that allows me to choose which OS I want to reboot next and from which source, including from usb. ( well, actually that was working great with yaboot, before I installed Void Linux which brought grub with it, need to work on how to have the script deal with grub, if that's possible at all, not really sure from what I've read :-/ ).

View attachment 2515963
Click to expand...
hmmm... : "Yet never got any "automatic" boot, gotta enter OF and then type the proper command to boot from usb"

yes i know but i can't either boot manual from usb either show the contents of any usb stick on this Powerbook.

So i think no USB Boot is possible on this machine.

My only option is to do get burned DVD ROM with ubuntu remix or

get the .iso to boot from hd.

But how i can do this... ?

can i boot the via yaboot the squashfs inside the iso ?
 
monkeyisland said:
hmmm... : "Yet never got any "automatic" boot, gotta enter OF and then type the proper command to boot from usb"

yes i know but i can't either boot manual from usb either show the contents of any usb stick on this Powerbook.
Click to expand...
yep, I was just saying that even before 4.8.6 no "auto-boot"was possible, at least not that I know of and not on my laptop. ;)

Since you've created the usb on a Linux machine (I do the same, not an issue), do you use the "bs" argument (block size) in the dd command line ? I've seen cases where if the bs is too high then the thing won't boot, while it will if I reduce the bs (no bullsh*t) to say 1M (I even went down to 1k once, but I don't think it's really necessary, takes veeeery long time to "burn" the usb stick !).
 
The automatic boot requires the boot loader file to have HFS file type code tbxi. What file type code does the yaboot file have?
 
joevt said:
The automatic boot requires the boot loader file to have HFS file type code tbxi. What file type code does the yaboot file have?
Click to expand...
When Fedora supported Mac PPC 32 and 64 bit, the bootloader (yaboot, grub) was blessed by the installer to set the tbxi file type.
 
ADunsmuir said:
When Fedora supported Mac PPC 32 and 64 bit, the bootloader (yaboot, grub) was blessed by the installer to set the tbxi file type.
Click to expand...
In Mac OS 9, you can use Resorcerer or ResEdit to set the file type. In Mac OS X or MPW, you can use the SetFile command.
\\ in the Open Firmware file path represents the blessed system folder. The bless command in Mac OS X can show that info.
Also, my dumpvols.sh script https://gist.github.com/joevt/a99e3af71343d8242e0078ab4af39b6c can show that info and boot info in partition map and master directory blocks.
 
AFAIU the bootloader within the ISO is supposedly blessed, though I'll admit to never checking for it (not even knowing anyway about the "blessing" thing in MacOS until more recently).

But isn't the fact that the usb stick does show up as a bootable item in the boot picker (Option key) mean that the bootloader is indeed blessed ?
 
Alubook133 said:
But isn't the fact that the usb stick does show up as a bootable item in the boot picker (Option key) mean that the bootloader is indeed blessed ?
Click to expand...
Yes. You mentioned that it appeared for you but @monkeyisland did not say it appeared for him.

It would be interesting to get dumpvols.sh output for the USB and the HD and compare to make sure they were blessed the same way.
 
joevt said:
Yes. You mentioned that it appeared for you but @monkeyisland did not say it appeared for him.
Click to expand...
true, I thought you were responding to my post. Also because in @monkeyisland case, it's not just that the usb stick refuses to boot, it even refuses to dir it's contents, whatever the usb stick he plugs in the machine - so there's probably more to it than a non-blessed file issue.
IOW, either he's really unlucky with his current set of usb sticks wrt to that machine, or the said machine just can't handle usb sticks, period (meaning a h/w and/or s/w issue with usb support on that laptop).

Yet I'd be curious to see an answer from him on my question :
Alubook133 said:
Since you've created the usb on a Linux machine (I do the same, not an issue), do you use the "bs" argument (block size) in the dd command line ? I've seen cases where if the bs is too high then the thing won't boot, while it will if I reduce the bs (no bullsh*t) to say 1M (I even went down to 1k once, but I don't think it's really necessary, takes veeeery long time to "burn" the usb stick !).
Click to expand...

Other than that, I believe CD/DVD or Firewire is probably the only way to go here (though netboot might be another option).
 
my experiences with a bunch of G4 Powerbooks is that the USB-Stick itself might have to high power requirements. E.g., I have a handful of newer USB3-dual A/C-sticks, from none of these a G4 PB will boot. I use an older USB2-A-stick on which I dd-ed the OSX installer (if you have only acces to a Windows system use the Rapberry Pi Imager for example).

nota bene: I boot the usb-installer via bringing up the startvolumes, autoboot has never worked for me.
 
Alubook133 said:
Yet I'd be curious to see an answer from him on my question :
Click to expand...
dd with a large block size shouldn't fail - all the 512 byte blocks that were read should be output up to the error.
But if that's not the case (e.g. only a multiple of bs was output), then maybe adding conv=notrunc might help?
For an HFS partition you can check if the partition ends with a copy of the Master Directory Block that exists at the beginning of the partition.
The copy does not need to have exactly the same contents for all the bytes.
Code: 
diskutil info /Volumes/Devs
   Device Identifier:         disk9s3
   Device Node:               /dev/disk9s3
   Disk Size:                 200.0 GB (199999995904 Bytes) (exactly 390624992 512-Byte-Units)
   Device Block Size:         512 Bytes

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk9s3 skip=2 count=1 | xxd
00000000: 482b 0004 8000 2000 4846 534a 0000 38b3  H+.... .HFSJ..8.
00000010: d9a9 924a e467 eca6 0000 0000 d9a9 f4ba  ...J.g..........
00000020: 001b 4f41 0006 3232 0000 1000 02e9 0edc  ..OA..22........
00000030: 0059 599c 02be 1511 0001 0000 0001 0000  .YY.............
00000040: 0049 d05d 033b 64de 0000 0000 0000 0001  .I.].;d.........

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk9s3 skip=$((390624992-2)) count=1 | xxd
00000000: 482b 0004 8000 2000 4846 534a 0000 38b3  H+.... .HFSJ..8.
00000010: d9a9 924a e232 8caa 0000 0000 d9a9 f4ba  ...J.2..........
00000020: 001e bdee 0004 e6fb 0000 1000 02e9 0edc  ................
00000030: 012b 5a09 001a 0008 0001 0000 0001 0000  .+Z.............
00000040: 003d fde7 02af fbdf 0000 0000 0000 0001  .=..............
 
@joevt, thanxx, didn't know about that option. Just googled this :
notrunc is only important to prevent truncation when writing into a file. This has no effect on a block device such as sda or sdb.
Click to expand...
so not sure if it applies to a usb stick. Anyhow, I found that a bs of 1M is "fast" enough and works most of the time, TBH, quite happy with it and don't intend to investigate this any further. Was just wondering whether it might help the situation with @monkeyisland's machine, nothing more.
 
Alubook133 said:
@joevt, thanxx, didn't know about that option. Just googled this :

so not sure if it applies to a usb stick.
Click to expand...
Yeah, notrunc is probably not applicable to block devices. I thought it might be something to try if you get a strange failure with large block sizes (a problem I don't recall ever running into).
notrunc is useful for when you want to modify parts of a file (such as a disk image) without affecting the file size.
 
Hi all i think i try now following :
sudo dd if=lubuntu-16.04-desktop-powerpc.iso of=/dev/sdf bs=1M status=progress

i test this in my A1138 machine
 
And this "crazy" :) A1052

Hangs... nothing ..... :(
 

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monkeyisland said:
So my A1138
Click to expand...
The * next to install means that it is the blessed system folder.

That means the following commands should show the contents of the install folder?
Code: 
dir usb0/hub@1/disk@1:,\install
dir usb0/hub@1/disk@1:,\\
dir usb0/@1/@1:,\\

monkeyisland said:
And this "crazy" :) A1052

Hangs... nothing ..... :(
Click to expand...
Maybe 4.9.6f0 is better at doing USB than 4.8.6f0...
I don't have the 4.8.6f0 ROM to compare to see if there's any important USB related differences.

I don't understand how some PowerBook5,8 have 4.9.5f3 09/22/05 instead of 4.9.6f0 10/05/05. I guess Apple updated the firmware without making a firmware updater? I wonder if your ROM has a different model revision number in the config block of the ROM. The PowerBook5,8 4.9.5f3 09/22/05 ROM that I have has revision number 01.

A ROM dump for both of these would be interesting. Then I can compare the USB code.

EveryMac.com says A1052 is for PowerBook5,3. It says PowerBook5,5 is A1085.
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g4/index-powerbook-g4.html

PowerBook G4 1.33 17" (Al) 1.33 GHz PowerPC 7447 (G4)
Model A1052
ID PowerBook5,3

PowerBook G4 1.5 17" (Al) 1.5 GHz PowerPC 7447a (G4)
Model A1085 (EMC 1983A)
ID PowerBook5,5

Does the PowerBook5,8 and the PowerBook5,5 have the same USB controller? Output from dump-device-tree would show that. Use telnet in Open Firmware to capture the output to a text file instead of using photos.
 
Okay this is strange so somebody put a a1085 Mainboard in a A1052 case. :)

Use telnet in Open Firmware to capture the output to a text file instead of using photos. ?

how i can i do that :)
 
In the meanwhile i gave up. I fired up my A1138. Burned a DVD Rom an plugged the other PB via Firewire.
Then i installed debian sid on the other Poberbook.
 
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