Hi all,

First post here, and very first interaction with Morphos.
Yesterday I was given for free a first Gen PowerMac G5 2x2Ghz machine.

I have tried to install Morphos via USB, followed all the instructions to the best of my understanding, but it's not working. As soon as I hit Enter, I get some sort of very fast flash that might indicate it's trying to boot, but then nothing but the Ø sign on the screen...

I used boot ud:,\boot.img bi umsd0:morphos.iso and boot usb2/disk@1:,\boot.img bi umsd0:morphos.iso.

Same result...

Can anyone help me with this install, please?

This should have a Radeon9600 but it might be a good idea to double check if it isn't something NVidia (which won't work).

Type and connection of used monitor may also be an issue.

Safest way is still to burn the ISO to a CD and boot from that.

It is the original Radeon 9600 card, not a Nvidia.
I can see it's trying to boot for about a second or so, and then Ø...

How to you burn a bootable Morphos Install CD on a Mac? I don't think I have a PC with a CD burner.

Thanks

[ Edited by Kidon 08.09.2024 - 21:06 ]

>> boot ud:,\boot.img bi umsd0:morphos.iso might be calling the boot.img of the Pegasus! Have you copied out the right boot.img for Powermac (from directory mac_ppc64)?
And of course, you need a supported Radeon-Card (Mac-native - not flashed PC-Card)

Quote:

If you got OSX or a Linux on the PMac that should be a non issue.

For some reason the OSX tool for that is the (HD) disk utility....

Quote:

Yes, I have copied the correctly boot.img from the PPC64 folder.

Quote:

I only have more modern Intel Macs with Sonoma.
I do have a 14900K Hackimtosh which has a Win 11 disk and a CD Burner (I forgot it was dual boot). I'll burn the Live CD and give it a try.

PS: The USB version of the .iso can't open in OSX.

Quote:

Well if you want to burn a CD using the "MorphOS Live CD Image" seems natural ;)

OSX Tiger/Leopard should have 0 issue loading and burning that.

Quote:

I did burn the Live CD .iso from Windows, but it's neither showing up in the boot options nor under MacOs 10.4...

[ Edited by Kidon 08.09.2024 - 21:58 ]

It could probably be useful to take a look at this thread:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=13585&forum=3

Quote:


Have you checked the md5 of your downloaded iso?

Quote:

Yep

Quote:

I saw it. But that didn't help.

I guess at this point it would be useless and too complicated to try to make this work.
It's not meant to be...

Thanks all for you help.

Don't give up so fast!
MorphOS is worth trying it once more!

Quote:

Trust me, I'd love to. But it's just not cooperating. Everything I tried, failed.

If someone has a 100% sure way of making this work, and is will to share the exact procedure, I'll try again.

Thanks

@ Kidon - It's fairly rare for a CD-DVD writer to become faulty from a hardware perspective. Usually it is the lens that gets a few, or more, specs of dust or debris on it, that just needs to be cleaned off with either some isopropyl alcohol, or window glass cleaning solution, which also usually contains isopropyl alcohol.

I usually get a piece of kitchen tissue, and I mean a small square, about 2x2cm and fold it loosely and spray some fluid onto the lower part, and wipe the glass lens with the very tip/edge of the tissue very lightly, and that more often than not removes the debris that was stopping the CD-DVD drive from reading or writing data off the disc.

Of course you'd need to remove the DVD-CD drive from inside the Power Mac, which is fairly simple to do, as there are 2 swing clips that release the drive from its bay, and you just need to disconnect the data, audio and power leads, and then take the screws out of the base of drive and separate the 2 halves of the drive assembly to reveal the lens area. Then you can check, if you happen to have a magnifying glass/lens of some kind, if there happens to be debris on it.

If you were in the UK I could send you a "burnt" cd of MorphOS v3.18 if you can't do it yourself, but Mac OSX has an option to burn normal ISO data files to disc (DVD or CD) as part of the system software, but you need to know if the DVD-CD can be got working first of all. I feel sure it could, as I have a few Power Macs and all the DVD-CD drives in them work normally.

Quote:

First, I would check that the mac is booting from original Apple CD. That would at least sorts out any defective CD/DVD drive before going the CD way.

If you'd like to try to boot thru USB one more time, there is some quite well written article on the matter here:

https://www.morphos-team.net/guide/usb-boot

Picking the right usb descriptor can be somewhat tricky and most problems come from that. The second failure point is failing to rightly point to the iso file in the argument.

Also, beware of the partition size of the usb stick and how you format it. Openfirmware can be picky here too. Afair, some OF has limitation on the partition size and its location on the usb stick.

MorphOS also have some limitation here afair but I don't remember the exact numbers. To be on the safe side, format the usb stick with a 1GB partition for example. Good enough to store the iso file and boot image.

From my experience, most of my failure to boot from USB was unsupported usb stick formating.


Good luck! :)

Quote:

Thanks, but the internal DVD drive works fine. I successfully install Debian PPC64 on that machine, as well as Sorbet Leopard.
I don't think it's the drive's fault.

Quote:

Hmmm... You may have a point there... The USB stick I'm using is 64Gb, one big partition...
In fact I retried, and got this message in OF: "Warning: Sector size mismatch! Can't OPEN hd:,\\:tbxi"
I'll try a small stick and make just one 1GB partition. Be back soon with results.

hd:,\\:tbxi would suggest a mistake in the command line you've typed. Try a stick no bigger than 32GB, FAT32/MBR formatted. Copy the ISO file to the stick, name it morphos.iso. Mount the ISO file and copy mac_ppc64/boot.img to the stick as well. Then in OpenFirmware: ud:,\boot.img bi umsd0:morphos.iso must work. Do make sure that :,\ are typed in correctly if yours isn't a USA keyboard!

Quote:

Thanks,

I have a US keyboard, and everything is typed correctly.
I just did exactly that on a 32Gb stick that I formatted in Sonoma FAT32/MBR
On the stick there is only the morphos.iso and the boot.img from the mac_ppc64 folder.
I still get the exact same error message...

Quote:

Did a 1GB partition or used the whole available space?

Also, maybe give a shot with those hints: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-new-method-booting-from-usb-on-powerpc-macs.2403368/

Quote:

Thanks.

Whole partition.