Xserve G5 (RackMac3,1) Installation Issues on powerpc64

[Bill Sorenson]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 10:19 AM, Evan Sabin
<memereferencehere at gmail.com> wrote:
> Firstly, likely to someone’s satisfaction and relief, I’m now starting the CD the right way. I have a 10.3 install disk just in case, but I started with 11.1 this morning, and this is what happened:
>
> The installer runs using 11.1-STABLE, up until attempting to fetch packages from ftp.freebsd.org. In such a case, all I get is repeated “File unavailable (e.g. file not found, no access)” errors over and over until it gives up and claims it has failed to retrieve the remote distribution. So that didn’t work worth a darn.
>
> Then, I did the unthinkable and installed 12.0-CURRENT with seemingly no problems for the most part. Unfortunately — and perhaps this is standard procedure, though I doubt it — kernel.txz is taking ages to extract (it’s been about half an hour at the time of writing). It’s been stuck at 21% for this time with no updates despite being able to move the mouse and select text etc., but I’m not keen on shutting down the system mid-install. Not to mention, the system is running at full blast. Should I go ahead and stop this, then try 10.3?

I defer to Nathan's expertise in this area but I would try 10.3 as I
can confirm that 'works for me.'

I'm going to start a build of 10.4 on my machine right now and I'll
see if it boots. If it doesn't I wont be able to collect more data
until this evening, I'm currently remote.