Installer Quits - Cannot format / partition

[John Baxendale]

TIA for any responses...

I'm attempting to install YellowDog 2.2 and keep getting to the point where
the installer formats my / partition, at this point I get a "installer
aborted abnormally" and the install program exits. I'm using the text
installer as the graphical installer does not boot, presumably not enough
ram in the machine to load it anyway.

Is there any way I can boot to a shell and manually format the drive ? I get
the impression the installer will want to reformat / as part of the process
even if I did this.

Anyone else encountered this problem ? How did you get round it ? I've been
through the archives but only found one person with a similar problem, no
solutions were offered... Any ideas ?

Machine is of the following spec:
 PowerMac 7200/90 with 32megs ram.
 SCSI CD-Rom on external bus @ id3
 SCSI HD @ Internal bus id0

Partition Map:
 Top level command (? for help): l /dev/sda
 finding devices .......

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/sda'
 #:                type name             length   base    ( size )
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple                63 @ 1
 2:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh            54 @ 64
 3:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh            74 @ 118
 4:      Apple_FWDriver Macintosh           200 @ 192
 5:  Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh           512 @ 392
 6:       Apple_Patches Patch Partition     512 @ 904
 7:     Apple_Bootstrap bootstrap         20481 @ 1416    ( 10.0M)
 8:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap             131073 @ 21897   ( 64.0M)
 9:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled        3674050 @ 152970  (  1.8G)
10:           Apple_HFS MacOS            409631 @ 3827020 (200.0M)
11:          Apple_Free Extra                10 @ 4236651

Thanks,
John Baxendale.