[Clfs-support] ppc64 recovery, and yaboot ?

[Ken Moffat]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 10:54:44PM -0500, William Harrington wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Sep 23, 2013, at 22:22, Ken Moffat <zarniwhoop at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 1. Any recommendations for a rescue CD to chroot to the old system ?
> > I suppose that means I'll need to find my old mac keyboard to be
> > able to open the CD drive.  #$^@"* this for a game of skittles :-(
> 
> Probably any recent PowerPC64 distro with a lived. I mostly use Debian these days.
> 
> > 
> > 2. Any ideas what I've done wrong in compiling/installing yaboot ?
> 
> I haven't thoroughly tested yaboot. In fact well need a patch to use parted instead of macfdisk. It's not much work. Something I'll finish soon.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> William Harrington

 Thanks for the reply.  I started with debian's latest (might have
been testing or unstable, not sure) but it's too new for my old
previous system - able to chroot, but couldn't work out the ofpath
variables for the NewWorld bootblock and OSX partitions - old google
reports suggest the kernel config on the CD doesn't support
CONFIG_IDE_PROC_FS (that system is three years old).  Looked for
older things : fedora 12 is still available, and looks a suitable
date, but it's an install not a Live CD (and didn't find my mouse to
set TZ stuff, so I had to stop).  Ubuntu's oldest is 12.04 - the mini
iso gives the dreaded 'unknown or corrupt filesystem' message (maybe
it only has a ppc32 kernel), the desktop version (live-ppc64 kernel)
starts to boot but then loses all video.  After which I tried this
week's gentoo minimal iso (20130922) : that works fine, let me chroot
and run ybin from the old system.  So now my new system is running
again. :-)

 Interestingly, gentoo found itself (the cdrom) at /dev/hda so I
guess my attempt to recompile the kernel to try to use /dev/sr0 for
CDs was a wasted effort.  Will need to look at my udev rules.

 Ah, the fun of this!  For now, I've renamed ybin in the new system
so I can't accidentally use it, but I'll keep that CD in the drive in
case I start experimenting ;-)

ĸen
-- 
das eine Mal als Tragödie, dieses Mal als Farce