Subject: Re: Installing MacOSX along with existing Linux Partitions, How?
From: William K. Gibson (firstdesk@columbus.rr.com)
Date: Fri Aug 03 2001 - 10:56:38 MDT
Before I say anything I would like to thank you for your response. I must
also say that my knowlege of the black art of configuring boot devices is
limited so I cannot always understand what you are discussing. Please excuse
my ignorance.
Anyway, I started the whole ybin process over and managed to get it to work
Yay! So thanks. If anyone wants to know about my saga futher, then read on.
Otherwise you can skip it.
on 8/3/01 12:09 AM, Derrik Pates at dpates@dsdk12.net wrote:
>
> 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.
I'm not sure how I asked MacOS9 to boot. But it did boot from the partition.
It got to the welcome screen and everything. What happened was that OSX
corrupted something on the OS9 disk. It booted fine and originally I had no
trouble booting OS9, Linux, or OSX, provided I did it manually from open
firmware.
>
> 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.
>
I used pdisk, which does not have the 'b' option. fdisk-mac only seems to
exist in the Debian distro, which I don't have. I actually started with
Yellowdog and then switched to the benh linuxppc kernel. Probably a bad
idea, but I got tired of waiting on the Yellowdog team to upgrade their own
kernel.
So I went ahead and created a new partition (14) as type Apple_Bootstrap.
Not sure if this was any reason for the eventual success but what the heck.
> 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.
Yes, I have nvsetenv, but it complained that I did not have /dev/nvram. I
tried to mknod to setup /dev/nvram as per the man page of nvsetenv, but then
nvsetenv complained that the device was not configured. It seems the
nvsetenv man page said it was Major number 1 and minor number 10. After
trying it with your major number 10 minor number 144, nvsetenv actually
worked. However, mkofboot still complained that nvsetenv was too old a
version (but this did not ultimately matter: see below).
>
>> 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
Yes, originally I tried that. I had to call it with one backslash like this:
setenv boot-device hd:10,\:tbxi
but then it complained that
Loading second stage bootstrap... cant OPEN hd:10,\\yaboot
The problem seemed to be that mkofboot only put the files on the top level
directory, and obviously ofboot.b wanted them in a blessed folder or some
such thing.
Anyway, after setting everything up again, I set the boot device on
partition 14 from open firmware and it worked fine. Oddly, I still had to
use 1 backslash. Perhaps mkofboot was more kind in the generation of the
files because of the way I made the partition.
> 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?
I had simply copy-pasted the contents of my old yaboot.conf into the new
one. Previously I had been using the bootscript method of dual booting into
Linux or MacOS9. I did not bother to edit it any further.
Again, thanks for the time you took to answer my email. You can feel good
that you contributed to removing at least one person's headaches :-)
--William K. Gibson
1stDesk Systems
firstdesk@columbus.rr.com
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