Subject: Re: Installing MacOSX along with existing Linux Partitions, How?
From: Derrik Pates (dpates@dsdk12.net)
Date: Thu Aug 02 2001 - 22:09:39 MDT
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, William K. Gibson wrote:
> I went ahead and collapsed the two end partitions of my drive and then
> intalled OSX. After booting it I tried to bring up OS9 on my other
> partition. The OS9 loader promply told me the OS was the wrong one for my
> system with a "restart" dialog box. Undeterred, I rebooted into OS9.
> Unfortunately OS9 refused to come up. It would get all the way to just
> before showing the icons on the screen and then hang- the mouse just
> disappeared and nothing.
How did you try to get OS 9 to boot? Using the Startup Disk control panel?
You have to leave the OS 9 system folder blessed (iirc) using Startup
Disk, but once you have set that up, I recommend (once Yaboot is working)
never changing it - 'Mac OS ROM' isn't very smart, it just tries to load
System and Finder from whatever System Folder happens to be blessed at the
time, and if the OS X System folder is blessed, it will probably complain.
I believe the OS X kernel (/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX) is smarter
about its boot process, once it's been loaded and started.
> What followed was hours and hours of rebuilding OS9 and restoring from
> backup, rebuilding OSX and trying the entire thing again. This time OS9
> classic came up in OSX (after asking to install something onto my OS9 disk-
> it didn't do that the first time, wierd). And I could boot into OS9 again
> (however it STILL occasionally decides to hang during startup- can't figure
> it out).
You could probably have saved yourself much headache by booting from the
OS 9.1 CD included in the OS X box, and pulling up the "Startup Disk"
control panel, and then selecting MacOS 9 from there.
> That done, I set about trying to use ybin with yaboot. Previously to this I
> had a small HFS partition with a system that I would put on yaboot and
> bootscript to do a dual boot. Having read the ybin stuff, I did the mkofboot
> on this partition. This placed a file called ofboot.b on the partition
> (/dev/hda10). It complained that there was no nvram to ammend. Strange
> because there was a System on that partition before (did I do something
> wrong?). It destroyed the partition in favor of itself, but what could I do,
> there were no other partitions to use. Then I called yabootconfig. This
> made the simple yaboot.conf file. I ammeded the yaboot.conf file to triple
> boot as per the manual.
That's normal behavior. When you do 'mkofboot', it creates a new HFS
filesystem (after prompting) and generates the ofboot.b Forth script, and
copies the yaboot loader and your yaboot.conf. I'd HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend
blowing that partition away, setting up just an 800k bootstrap partition
(the 'b' command in fdisk-mac, iirc), that way OS 9 won't unbless the
Forth bootscript (changing the creator ID from the "magic" one ('tbxi') to
a normal one) by mounting the partition (it gets a type of
Apple_Bootstrap, which OpenFirmware can mount, but MacOS won't). MacOS 9
automatically unblesses EVERYTHING that's not it that it has mounted.
Do you have the powerpc utils installed? One of the tools included with
them is called nvsetenv, which allows the bootstrap setup tool to set the
'boot-device' variable in NVRAM. On debian, the package is called
'powerpc-utils' - if you're using a RH-derived distro (like LinuxPPC 2000
or YellowDog), it's probably similar.
> Not exactly knowing what else to do, I booted into open firware and typed:
>
> setenv boot-device hd:10,\yaboot
Nonono. You're calling yaboot directly. The multiboot menu (MacOS, OS X,
Linux, boot from CD, etc.), is generated by the ofboot.b Forth bootscript.
You'd do better to type
setenv boot-device hd:10,\\:tbxi
to have it do the normal "magic" creator ID search on your bootstrap
partition.
> Here is my yaboot file:
You do realize that, for the image paths, you don't have to specify the
device (hd:11,) since the device= and partition= flags already have it
tagged as the default filesystem to look at for loading a kernel. Right?
Derrik Pates | Sysadmin, Douglas School | #linuxOS on EFnet
dpates@dsdk12.net | District (dsdk12.net) | #linuxOS on OPN
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