[Westwales] Debian and firewire drives

[Colin Sauze]

I think you'll find that the debian installer is based on kernel version 
2.2 which is rather old, so its probably not going to support firewire 
devices during installation. You might well be able to get debian 
running off a newer kernel having installed it on a hard disk and then 
move it to the firewire drive. You might also find that some other linux 
distributions are based on newer kernels and can support firewire at 
install time.

Even still i'm not sure you will be able to boot off firewire without 
something to start off the boot process running from your internal 
drive, cdrom or over the network. Perhaps someone with more experience 
on Macs can answer that one.

Jon Pearse wrote:

> Hi,
>
>   I went out and bought a 160GB firewire hard drive a couple of weeks 
> back, largely as a backup device for my iBook. However, even if I 
> imaged the iBook's hard drive and saved that to the external, I'd have 
> 100GB free... so, what does one do with 100GB free hard disk space?
>   One decides that now is the time to have a serious foray into the 
> world of Linux and put this stuff one has been taught at uni into 
> practice, of course (I never claimed that I was sane). The idea being 
> that, as the external drive is empty, I don't have to bother backing 
> everything up so I could reformat everything. Having heard good things 
> about Debian, I decided to run with that and annoy my housemates by 
> downloading 4GB of data overnight on the shared DSL connection.
>
>   So, I now have a G3-based iBook, a 160GB external firewire hard 
> drive that will allow me to boot off it (I checked this before I 
> bought it), a set of debian (3.0r5) install CDs, and four slightly 
> miffed housemates.
>   But this is where the problems start - Debian apparently doesn't 
> play well with firewire hard drives, so when I got to the "select a 
> disk" part of the installation procedure, the only option was the 
> internal hard drive... and I'd rather avoid having to wipe that and 
> reinstall everything later.
>
>   So, does anyone here know how I can get around this and get Linux - 
> of some variety - running off the firewire drive? The readme files 
> seem to suggest that the only way to do this is by recompiling the 
> kernel with additional drivers, which would require me to wipe the 
> internal drive, and install Linux on that... not something I'm going 
> to do at any point in the near future. Any advice as to how I could 
> get Linux on the external drive without having to mess around too much 
> would be gratefully appreciated.
>   If there's no way around this, then I'll not bother and Linux can 
> wait for the day I have a spare computer knocking around... in which 
> case, if anyone wants a full set of Debian 3.0r5 PPC disks...
>
>   Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> -Jon
>
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>  http://www.jonpearse.net                            jon at jonpearse.net
>  AIM/Skype: JonDPearse                      Phone: +44 (0)78 1260 2710
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