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I am attempting to install Gentoo on my PowerPC Mac. I have reached the point where I can boot the LiveCD (I have no CD Drive, so it is from my Hard Drive), but after the kernel is loaded, I get a message "No root found at ultra1:,\boot\ppc32 or something to that effect. It then gives me the options: shell to get into a shell, q to skip, enter to try the same again.

q to skip doesn't work, but it prints a nice warning >> Skipping. This will likely cause a boot error. Then it can't find /newroot in /etc/SOMETHING (I can't remember).

The shell won't really help me, if I try: dev/hda (the only thing I can find in /dev that looks like the second internal harddrive I am booting from), I only get the nice warning No mountable filesystems!.

Any advice for what to set the root to? I'd just use the root=foo from yaboot, but I don't know what to set foo to. Thanks!

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How did you setup the CD on your HD? Or a better question, can you boot from LiveUSB? It sounds like the LiveCD doesn't have the drivers for whatever drive/transport channel you are using. Which is weird. Either that or it's expecting root to be where it's not. – Nick Aug 5 '12 at 12:52
I changed the yaboot.conf to point to ultra1: instead of cd: and I set the root (root= at the yaboot prompt) to /dev/disk1s1 (as it is on the OSX install). As for drivers, it is loading the hard drive from Ultra-ATA port 1, the second of 4 hot-swap hard drive bays my computer has. If the LiveCD can boot, it has the drivers. LiveUSB might potentially work, but my computer doesn't inherently support it, so I'd rather not. – T.C. Aug 5 '12 at 14:26
I ended up installing a Debian installation disk to a USB using 'sudo dd if="~/Desktop/mini.img" of="/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m", then from a successful install of Debian I could chroot into a Gentoo tarball, which I did with great success. My computer is now running Gentoo! – T.C. Nov 25 '12 at 14:28

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I ended up installing a Debian installation disk to a USB flash drive using 'sudo dd if="~/Desktop/mini.img" of="/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m", then from a successful install of Debian I could chroot into a Gentoo tarball, and install that way. To reformat hard-drives, I booted into the "rescue" mode of the Debian install disk. Same went for fixing yaboot problems after I finished my install of Gentoo, by execting a shell inside the gentoo partition, I was able to fix yaboot without needing to boot the operating system.

I was at last successful, thank you all for the help.

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