Mac Mini ***?

I have a PPC mac mini 1.25Ghz with a Gig of ram 120GB HD and i have an external Western Digital My Book home hooked up via firewire.

I got on cisco alumni website and wow paket tracer 5 there is a linux build for it so i figure hey apple made firewire simple to boot off of so i will just install linux on a partition of my fw drive so i partion using the apple partion map all is well at this point. Next i boot Ubuntu my linux of choice go through the installer and it finishes and reboots back to 10.5 so i reboot with opt. key held no linux drive there. So i have all but given up on the pursuit of linux on it short of formatting internal but dont want to do that i got 120GB ish worth of data that i dont want to loose. So i tell linux to install yaboot on the internal and it FUBARS the internal drive wipes all.

The issue now how do i get my drive back the way it was and why the heck wont it boot firewire.

P.S. writing from library because it chimes the screen kicks to black and spins the CD the USB hub doesnt kick on nothing but a blank screen and a spinning CD.

hi

i dont think linux can load on macs (there are only some special distros). and, i would hope that linux did not erase ur HDD. if u have the original OS disk, boot from it, and see what happened to ur hdd. i think u can unpartition from there.

justin_clark93 said:

i dont think linux can load on macs (there are only some special distros). and, i would hope that linux did not erase ur HDD. if u have the original OS disk, boot from it, and see what happened to ur hdd. i think u can unpartition from there.

Click to expand...

That used to be the case, but as of the Intel switch there are quite a few distros that can be loaded on Macs. But the OP is using a PPC, which means there are, indeed, only a few distros that will cross over. Yellowdog and Gentoo come to mind.

As the previous poster said, I would load up the original install disc and go into the Disk Utility and see what it says there. Do not partition it from there though. Hopefully someone else can chime in here as to how to get the partition table back, if it was erased.

Fedora Core and Debian have PPC but the problem until last nights is it didnt want to do anything after chime it would just sit there like it bricked on me but now it boots i dont want to install orig. OS or anything on the internal drive so im tring to boot from my ext firewire but it doesnt want to boot from it even with no cd in the drive.

The firewire drive can be active and it will just sit there and ask for a startup volume even when i have it set to boot from the drive 10.5 wouldnt let me format it to the wrong file structure so that is right.

lifeafter2am said:

That used to be the case, but as of the Intel switch there are quite a few distros that can be loaded on Macs. But the OP is using a PPC, which means there are, indeed, only a few distros that will cross over. Yellowdog and Gentoo come to mind.

As the previous poster said, I would load up the original install disc and go into the Disk Utility and see what it says there. Do not partition it from there though. Hopefully someone else can chime in here as to how to get the partition table back, if it was erased.

Click to expand...

yes, i knew that. he was a PPC processor though, so those would not work. i have tried it. and a bootable disk created on a windows machine will not boot on a mac for some reason.

I finally just got an HP desktop coppied the contents off the old 40GB that was in it when i got it and put it as the internal drive booted up off the DVD and installed on the drive, put the 120 in a USB enclosure and recovered it with testdisk and testdisk it didnt recover the partition table but the companion app photorec worked to get most of my media files back and now im just using that 120 as my Time Machine drive so that it doesnt happen again. Its easyer to backup and waste a disk than have to have 3 OSs to get a few files

For PowerPC's to boot from an external drive, it needs to be formatted Apple Partition Map and at least a Firewire 400 connection. PowerPC can never boot off USB2.

Erase the external drive when connected by firewire, go to Apple Partition Map and set up, then format Mac OS Extended (Journaled), back up with SuperDuper and it should be bootable.