Booting YDL 2.1 on B&W G3 Problems

[Jeffrey Bruton]

I have OS X on my original Drive, as well as a couple versions of OS 9. 
I will have to look into weather or not I can put OS X on the sonnet 
card, with the other drive jumpered as master of course. Thanks for the 
input, I have been poking around in OF, so far no luck. I also know that 
there was a problem with the IDE controller in the rev 1 B&Ws. I need 
the drive, still, but I may be able to snag one out of another machine 
if necessary, or get a replacement. This is becoming quite the ordeal. 
This B&W has caused me many a problem trying to achieve the simplest of 
things because of bugs and hardware flaws. It's my first computer, and 
it took a year before Apple believed me that the motherboard was bad, 
and it was. Dumb luck I suppose. I'll keep fighting it though, I would 
have never learned as much as quickly if it all worked right. Thanks to 
Tim as well for the lead. I found some OF documentation so I could 
figure out how to get around.

Bill Fink wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Here are some of my experiences with installing Linux on a B&W G3 at work.
>First, it just would not install on the slave drive, so I had to switch
>master and slave.  It is my understanding that early B&W G3s cannot boot
>from a slave drive because of an OpenFirmware bug.
>
>But even after installing Linux on the now master drive, I was still
>having all kinds of problems actually running Linux on that system
>including weird system errors and file system corruption.  These finally
>went away went I installed a custom built 2.4.19-pre8-ben0 kernel.
>
>However, I noticed that Linux wasn't detecting the original (now slave)
>internal disk drive.  I tracked this down to not having the CMD64X driver
>configured in my kernel and added it in.  Linux then detected the slave
>drive, but unfortunately the weird system errors and file system
>corruption also returned.  I also checked and determined that the
>default YDL 2.1 2.4.10-12a kernel has the CMD64X driver enabled,
>which explained the earlier problem behavior.  It is my understanding
>that some of the early disks in the B&W G3s had buggy firmware, so I
>got bit by two early B&W G3 bugs.
>
>Since the new master drive was large enough, and I didn't really need
>the original (now slave) internal disk drive, I simply copied the MacOS
>installation to a partition on the new master drive, and disabled the
>CMD64X driver in my kernel (or alternatively you could just remove the
>original internal disk drive).  Since then, which was about a month ago,
>Linux has been running reliably on this work B&W G3.
>
>						-Hope this helps
>
>						-Bill
>
>
>
>On Fri Jun 28, Jeffrey Bruton wrote:
>
>  
>
>>One more time, not in HTML either (sorry about that)
>>
>>I am having problems getting my machine to boot YDL 2.1, which I 
>>installed from the CD. Everything went fine, but booting from the HD is 
>>the problem.
>>
>>I have a B&W G3, rev 1 with a drive jumpered as slave connected to a 
>>sonnet tempo PCI controller card. I have read the HOWTO-Booting with 
>>Yaboot on PowerPC - Recovering From Misconfiguration. From that I 
>>decided to try this at OF
>>
>>boot ide1:7,yaboot
>>
>>I get the this message
>>
>>method <load> not found; ihandle=3Dff9cf500  phandle=3Dff874890 
>>load-sixe=3D0  adler32=3D1
>>
>>LOAD-SIZE is too small
>>
>>I don't know what that means. The following is a summary of my output 
>>from entering devalias at the OF prompt
>>
>>ide0    /pci/@d/mac-io/ata-3@20000
>>ide1    /pci/@d/pci-ata@1/ata-4@0
>>hd    /pci/@d/pci-ata@1/ata-4@0/disk0
>>ultra0    /pci/@d/pci-ata@1/ata-4@0/disk0
>>ultra1    /pci/@d/pci-ata@1/ata-4@0/disk1
>>
>>I have only included HD related output. I really want to get YDL 
>>running, and then upgrade to 2.3. If someone can help I would really 
>>appreciate it.
>>    
>>
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>  
>