Bug 103141 – LiveCD mount problem on boot in G4 PowerMac (PCI graphics)

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

[Description Diego Zamboni 2005-08-20 07:07:51 UTC]

When booting from the 2005.1 PPC Universtal Install CD on a first-generation PowerMac G4 (PCI graphics), 
the boot process cannot find the media CD, and finishes with a "no bootable medium found" error. From 
the BusyBox shell, it is possible to mount the CD by specifying the filesystem type (iso9660) in the mount 
command. However, the mount command without a file system specification fails every time.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot from the 2005.1 universal install CD on a first-generation PowerMac G4 (PCI)
2. Select the ppc32 kernel
3. After it fails, type "shell" to drop into a shell
4. Execute the following commands: mkdir -p /mnt/cdrom; mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /
mnt/cdrom. Sometimes this command also fails, but succeeds after a few tries.


Expected Results:  
The CD should be recognized properly.

In the end, I was able to continue the installation by booting with the "debug" kernel parameter. In the 
debug shell, I mounted the CD manually, and when continuing, it recognized the device was already 
mounted, and things proceeded normally.

I have the impression this problem could be hard to eliminate, since it seems to be tied to the hardware 
(everything works fine on my Powerbook), but something that would help is if there were an additional 
parameter to the boot process to specify the file system type to use for mounting the CD (e.g. ppc32 
cdfstype=iso9660).

[Comment 1 Lars Weiler (RETIRED) 2005-08-21 13:38:51 UTC]

I tested the CD on a G4 PowerMac 533, but it's the version with AGP-video. 
Anyways, it has two graphic-cards installed (nVidia on AGP and an ATi-Card on
PCI) and both worked with the correct video=-setting.

That the CD is recognised, but not automatically mounted, sounds more like that
the CD-ROM can't deliver the data quick enough before it runs into a timeout.

[Comment 2 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2005-08-23 06:08:56 UTC]

Try booting with "scandelay" and see if it resolves the issue.

[Comment 3 Diego Zamboni 2005-08-23 13:57:08 UTC]

I did try with scandelay, and it didn't help. From my examination of the init script, scandelay only gets 
used later, after the CD has been mounted.

[Comment 4 Lars Weiler (RETIRED) 2005-12-17 19:25:09 UTC]

Sounds really hardware-related.  Once I had problems with a SCSI-machine and I needed four different CD-ROM-drives until I found one, which was fast enough to respond in time.

I don't think, that this problem is resolvable, so I'll close this bug.