Solved: White Screen of Death on new Dual G4

[Jim Steed]

Hello all,

Over the past few weeks, I have posted about my problem getting a white/grey
screen of death when booting any OS from the Yaboot menu.  After taking this
question to (tada) the Yaboot-Users email list, I finally got the answer I
needed.

The following is from Ethan Benson, and it worked like a charm for me as far
as getting Linux to boot:
http://lists.penguinppc.org/yaboot-users/2002/yaboot-users-200210/msg00014.h
tml.  I didn't exactly follow his directions (perhaps to my own detriment)
and instead just did "boot ultra2:9,yaboot" (my boot partition is hda9) and
then selected "linux-novideo" from yaboot.  Then I did the /etc/yaboot.conf
edits precisely as he said.  After doing this, I can boot Linux, but
unfortunately not MacOSX.

After I informed the $30 YDL support service of this fix Ethan Benson
provided, (and with their memory now awakened) they said the following
should also work and might be easier to follow.  Doing this after Ethan
Benson's fix gives me a system that can boot both Linux and MaxOSX (you may
want to start with this, or you may want to start with Ethan's message, I
don't pretend to understand the difference between ultra2 and hd in each of
these steps).

	From OF
	boot ultra2:,\\yaboot

	+ As Linux boots you'll see the following message:

	modprobe: modprobe: Cant locate module block-major-2

	This is not a bad thing.
	+ Log in as root.
	+ edit /usr/sbin/ofpath
	- Look for the following line:

	newworld()

	Scroll down a little more and you will see

	case "$DEVNODE" in

	- Scroll down a little more until you see a line that looks like:

	hda*)

	- Below that you'll see a line that says:

	echo "hd:$PARTITION"

	- Change it to:

	echo "ultra2:$PARTITION"

	- Save the file and exit.

	+ Run /usr/sbin/ybin

	+ Reboot and YDL should work fine.

Hopefully others stuck at the same point will find this useful.  (Now on to
getting around the Network Setup and Radeon 7000 problems with the YDL
install....)

Thanks,
jim steed