Installation trouble Old Newworld Powerbook G3 PPC

[jmerkin]

I'm not a complete newbie..been using Kubuntu for about a year now. I'm comfortable with it and wanted to start trying some other distros to see what strikes my fancy. I was given an old Powerbook G3 (I believe 333MHz) and have been trying to install debian etch on it (made sure to use PPC versions). I figured I would try debian since I'm familiar with ubuntu and it has official PPC support.

I've tried the full CD install, the net install, and the business card cd, and have come up with errors each time. I get to installing the base and it will crash, giving me "Debootstrap error (return value 139)". Using the install debug, the first error I can find involves the kernel (kernel: XFS: bad number, kernel: XFS: SB validate failed, kernel: Oops: Kernel access of bad area, sig: 11 [#1], among others). Then it says "debootstrap: Segmentation fault". I really don't know where to go from here. Any ideas?

[jmerkin]

I should add I checked the md5sum.

[jmerkin]

Any ideas? I don't think it would be a bad hard drive because MacOS loaded up fine and the computer worked fine before the first formatting.

[geniuz]

Are you sure you've correctly partitioned your drive ? (ext3 and swap, duhh)
If you did it in the installer, I could suggest trying gparted-livecd, as I also sometime encountered problems after I partitioned with the partitioner supplied with the installer...

[jmerkin]

Yeah. It has 320MB RAM so I made a swap partition with the same amount. I did a considerable amount of additional googling and found the following post from a while ago. yaboot won't install to harddrive - Ubuntu Forums

The person suggested formatting the boot sector as ext3 and then reformatting it as the boot partition, as his was corrupted. That did the trick for me with that.

Now I get further in the installation but it locks up mid-installation. It doesn't do it consistently at the same point, but it always does before it is complete. I also tried installing Yellowdog and it too locks up during the install process. The laptop gets hot so I have been opening the keyboard and applying something cold, in case the large amount of processing is making it overheat, so I don't think it would be that.

Any ideas?