Xserve G5 (RackMac3,1) Installation Issues on powerpc64

[Bill Sorenson]

A long time ago I installed 10.3 onto a hard disk in a PowerMac G5 and
swapped the disk into my xserve and it's been running fine ever since. For
the life of me I can't remember why I had to do that. I had issues with
10-STABLE a while back on PPC64 and have yet to try upgrading to 10.4 but
will do so soon.

I'd burn a 10.3 disc and see if that works.

On Feb 13, 2018 1:31 PM, "Evan Sabin" <memereferencehere at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have run the Apple Hardware Test on an Xserve G5 (dual 2GHz 970FX) and
> confirmed that I am unable to install FreeBSD due to issues with the
> installer itself on powerpc64, specific to the Xserve G5 apparently,
> judging by numerous successful installations on PowerMacs of the same era.
>
> Last night, I downloaded and burned 11.1 release to a DVD and successfully
> booted from OF (accomplished through removing the hard disk at boot time)
> to the FreeBSD kernel, where I immediately encountered a kernel panic due
> to a floating-point unavailable trap; exception 0x800.
>
> This morning I downloaded and burned 10.4 release onto another DVD and
> attempted to install — not a whole lot of success. I am able to boot into
> the live CD, but cannot proceed with the installation, as I receive a
> generic partitioner error upon attempting to use the auto or manual,
> forcing me to continuously restart the installation process. The shell
> works, though I’m not perfectly sure if that can be used to partition the
> system. Might this be related to my “lazy” workaround of booting from DVD
> by removing the hard drive and re-inserting it once OF has recognized the
> DVD?
>
> Is there any patch/workaround I might be able to use just to complete
> installation? I am no programmer, but am competent enough to patch and
> compile code to fix things in a pinch. Ideally I’d like to use the latest
> version of FreeBSD but will do what it takes to get some relatively modern
> software working on this machine.
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