Arch Linux

OakRaider4Life

Member

Registered: 2012-02-08

Posts: 98

[ArchPPC] No disk? W-t-f?

Recently, I was trying to turn a friend of mine onto Arch Linux who wanted me to install linux on his Powerbook G4. I was able to get an Arch Linux PPC build, which booted just fine and all that jazz, successfully partitioned his disk (the hard part... so I thought), but when it came time to choose filesystems and mount points, the installer was not displaying any system hard disks at all... did I completely miss something here?

Don't get me wrong, I love arch... but at this point, I pretty thoroughly hate macbooks. Any help is appreciated!

MadTux

Member

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 553

Re: [ArchPPC] No disk? W-t-f?

Just a guess but is this maybe a GPT partition? As far as I know, fdisk is not able to deal with that.

OakRaider4Life

Member

Registered: 2012-02-08

Posts: 98

Re: [ArchPPC] No disk? W-t-f?

The default filesystem format is hfs+, and the installer couldn't read it. I thought that pre-preparing the partitions might help deal with this problem, so I booted into gparted from an ubuntu PPC live install and prepared an ext2 and an ext4 partition on the hard drive. Even after preparing ext partitions, the Arch PPC installer still could not read the presence of a hard drive.

/dev/zero

Member

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2011-10-20

Posts: 1,247

Re: [ArchPPC] No disk? W-t-f?

I was trying to turn a friend of mine onto Arch Linux

Bad idea from the start. Some people are naturally attracted to Arch Linux. Everyone else will first break it and then bitch about it ;-)

Even after preparing ext partitions, the Arch PPC installer still could not read the presence of a hard drive.

I have "rootfstype=ext4" passed to the kernel at boot time. Does that help?

ZekeSulastin

Member

Registered: 2010-09-20

Posts: 266

Re: [ArchPPC] No disk? W-t-f?

Is the module pata_macio loaded?

(also you should really only be using mac-fdisk to alter the partition table on a powermac ...)

DaNiMoTh

Member

Registered: 2006-06-10

Posts: 260

Re: [ArchPPC] No disk? W-t-f?

modprobe pata_macio

I know that problem, I have another (newer) version of the ISO but it has other problems, which are under fixing.

I'll release soon I can.

neighborhoodhacker

Member

Registered: 2012-08-06

Posts: 45

Re: [ArchPPC] No disk? W-t-f?

I had the same problem. I fixed it by adding sd_mod and pata_macio to the mkinitcpio. You need BOTH to work. I confirmed from recovery shell. But if like me you won't be able to boot after that. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 2#p1142802