[shifuimam]

I posted about this more than six months ago with no good answer, so I figured there might be some fresh faces around by now who might have some idea of what's going on here...

I've got a 466Mhz tangerine clamshell iBook G3. I replaced the old CD-ROM with a CD-RW/DVD module pulled from a Compaq laptop. At first it refused to boot from any bootable CD, but I have since been able to boot from my retail Panther discs without issue.

I cannot, however, boot from any other bootable disk. I've tried four different releases of PPC Ubuntu to no avail. If I do an option+boot to bring up the little device selection screen, if I select the CD (the screen shows a hard drive icon with a blue X logo and a CD icon with a Tux logo, so it knows it's there) and click the arrow to continue, the screen appears to lock up for a minute, blinks, and displays the device selection screen with wonky colors on the drive icons. It absolutely refuses to boot from a Linux disc.

I also used my boyfriend's PowerBook G4 to try and install Linux via firewire target disk mode. It got about 90% through the installation and failed with an undefined "fatal error" type thing. I'd really love to get Linux installed on this thing, since OS X is pretty slow on it and I'm not too interested in going back to OS 9 - I have little experience with that OS and the freeware I've found is nearly all OS X-only.

Does anyone have any ideas why the drive would boot so selectively? I'm going to assume that it started booting from OS X CDs because of an OS update, since the firmware was up-to-date before. Is there something special I need to do to make the bootable Ubuntu ISO work? I've always burned it in Disk Utility - I haven't done it on a Windows machine yet, I don't think.

Advice is, as always, greatly appreciated.

[jaaron7]

I'm having the same problem with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. If I boot holding down C it flashes and then stays on a grey screen with no disk activity, if I try selecting the Ubuntu disk on the boot selection screen that comes up when you hold down option, it flashes and goes back to the boot selection screen with messed up colours. Heck of it is, I was able to boot the Ubuntu live cd just a few months ago.
I've tried resetting PRAM, but it didn't help.

I was messing around in Open Firmware trying to see if I could come up with anything useful, and when I told it to boot, it flashed for a second, then came up with
"can't OPEN: cd:,\install\yaboot"

I've got a 450MHz AGP G4. I too can boot from my OSX disks, but not Ubuntu. I've not tried my old YDL disks, but they use yaboot too, so I think I'll dig them out and see if they'll work. If not, then probably for some reason or another, OF just doesn't like Yaboot all of a sudden.

*update*
So I dug out my old YDL 3 disks and they did the exact same things. I've also tried disconnecting all but the essential hardware, even down to just the cd-rom..
I don't understand why it would work, and then suddenly just not work anymore.

oh, and I still have the original DVD-RAM drive that came with the computer. It won't boot in that drive, or my new DVD burner

[mfbernstein]

Somebody on the Ubuntu forums seems to have succeeded with the clamshell iBook ( iBook Clamshell OS 9 - Ubuntu Forums ). You might want to check there. I recall having similar problems with YellowDog Linux on my PowerBook G4, but don't remember how I got around them.

[ghporter]

We have a whole forum just for running something other than MacOS on a Mac. I'll move this thread there...

[rubaiyat]

To my knowledge Apple's CD/DVD drives have a special chipset that allow them to be bootable.

Non Apple drives allow you to read and write to CD/DVD media but not boot from them.

You might be able to get special drives from some of the Mac suppliers but specify that they must be bootable.

[jaaron7]

I finally tracked down the cause of the problem. For me, somehow the aliases hd and cd got mixed up (and no amount of PRAM resetting fixed it..) and so "boot cd:,\install\yaboot" actually pointed to the master hard drive instead of to the cd drive, so I typed in "boot hd:,\install\yaboot" and it booted off the cd.

so, to anyone else with this problem, go to Open Firmware, and check "dir cd:\" and make sure it actually prints out the directory of the cd. If not, then you'll have to use its actual name.

I was able to install Ubuntu and get it working with just the hard drive I wanted it installed on hooked up. Now that I've got both of my drives in though, I'm running into the same problem. ...at least now I know what's going on though.

..oddly enough, it was the non-apple cd drive that I had to use for the boot disk. It wouldn't boot off the apple disk. I'm guessing this has something to do with the fact that the non-apple drive is Master.

[Ellsworth]

SYMPTOM: I had no success in burning a bootable Ubuntu LiveCD using Apple Disk Utility - the resulting CD would not boot in a PowerBook G3/500 (Pismo). I found others in online forums who had the same experience.

CULPRIT: Apparently CDs burned with Apple Disk Utility (in OS 10.4.8, in my case) don't create the same results as other applications.

MY SOLUTION: Burning the image using Roxio Toast (v7, in my case) made the difference - I was able to boot the resulting Ubuntu v6.10 CD in the PowerBook.

p.s. Peformance of Ubuntu v6.10 was encouraging. Of course, disk access from CD was sluggish, but with a real hard drive installation, this would be a very functional computer with its 7 year-old 500MHz G3 CPU. It's still quite useful with Mac OS 10.3.9, I'm just exploring possibilities for other old machines.