Finnix Forums » General Discussion

Help me please!!!


  1. Gumbos
    Member

    I have a 1999 Apple iBook Clamshell, I did Something that went very wrong, I installed system 6 (a very old OS from Apple, The OS is perhaps from the late 1980`s) so I intalled sytem 6 the wrong way, now the iBook appears to have a booting problem, so I downloaded Finnix to fix this, so I want to change the system that the iBook boots, but I dont know hot to this, Right now in my Hard drive, I have Mac OS X, in it but it does not boot to Mac OS X, at it boots from system 6, but system 6 is corrupted, so I does not boot, so please, Tell me how I can change what system my iBook boots.
    Thankyou
    Posted Wed, 06 Sep 2006 08:39:34 -0700

  2. Johnny
    Member

    Well I know on the IMac that I have, you can hit C while its booting up, and depending on things you'll know right from that if a CD is good to boot up or not. I think theres another way as well. But pressing C when it starts seems to work for me. Hope that helps.
    Posted Tue, 12 Sep 2006 05:37:25 -0700

  3. Gumbos
    Member

    yes I tried all that, but it seems that OS X is not an option for booting when pushing all buttons, my goal is to boot Finnix and the find the system 6 folder and delete it with finnix but I got to know the commands to access the Hard drive and delete files, without the system 6 folder on the Hard drive Mac OS X will boot just fine.
    any ideas on how to access Hard drive and deleting files?
    Posted Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:37:48 -0700

  4. Johnny
    Member

    I burned a copy of Debian and when I pressed C, it went right into Debian start up screens and threw on Yaboot automatically, then it procedes through the installation process. Once you're in it gives you an option for Debian to erase everything on the hard drive automatically and for it to take over. My problem with Debian was the fact that I'm not quite sure of my Monitor size (I think its either 15 or 14 inch) and as far as I know my system specs won't even tell me what video card I'm using. You need to know these things for the GUI to work and thats something I didn't know. Here was all the information I got:

    Machine Speed: 500 Mhz
    Bus Speed: 100 Mhz
    Number of Processors: 1
    L2 Cache Size: 512K
    Machine Model: iMac (version 83.2)
    Boot ROM info: 4.1.9f1

    Memory Overview:

    DIMM0/J13 Type= Blank Size= Empty
    DIMM1/J14 Type=SDRAM Size= 256MB

    ATY,Rage128Pro, ATY,Rage128Pro, AGP, 8 MB is what I think my video card is, perhaps I should go to ATI's website and maybe see about downloading the Linux driver or something.

    With my machine it does not tell me what size my Monitor is nor what brand my video card is and the properties for it. With Debian, you can easily install it by nabbing the Network Boot file from the Debian site and burning it to CD. When you press C it should go right into the installation process. My guess is that once Debian installs and tosses YaBoot on there if you can manage to get into the GUI (Which I couldn't at all do, due to my issues of getting Black Screens and Error Messages) you could either be fine with that, or toss in the Finnix CD and either install over Debian or possibly upgrade from Debian depending on how things work (seeing as how I never installed it). Since Debian automatically puts on Yaboot and you don't have to go through any craziness its actually pretty easy which is probably why Debian will go through the installation process when you hit C and nothing else will. Getting the GUI to work is a HUGE headache. If you can manage to do it my hat is off to you. Cause it was near impossible for me to do and I winded up going back to Mac OSX. Not even XFree86 could help me there. Not to mention the fact that at the command prompts, I couldn't even see what I was typing, due to the fact that it was all the way below the screen where I could see.

    If you don't like Debian or just want to clear the partition and use MacOSX, I'll tell you that all I had to do was throw in the MacOSX CDs and when you boot into it, the top menu allows you to mess around with the partitions (delete them, create em etc.) and put back in MacOSX. Maybe theres even a way from there to just boot into the MacOSX install and then wipe out the partition that you don't want.
    Posted Wed, 13 Sep 2006 15:47:53 -0700