Trying to Install YDL on G3 Beige

[Alexander Holst]

Hi Lola,

Am 08.04.2004 um 14:40 schrieb 
yellowdog-general-request@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com:

> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 20:41:53 -0400
> To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> From: Lola Lee <lola@his.com>
> Subject: Trying to Install YDL on G3 Beige
> Reply-To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
>
> I'm trying to install Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 on my G3 desktop
> machine.  The problem is when I select the local CDROM as the
> installation method, I get "The Yellow Dog Linux CD was not found in
> any of your cdrom drives. Please insert the YDL cd and click OK to
> retry".
>
> Backing up a bit, I had an 160GB hard drive installed, made it the
> master drive.  The original drive is now the slave drive, as is the
> CD ROM drive.

You might already be in trouble here :(

There were two Revisions of the Beige G3s, one capable of handling two 
devices per IDE Bus (Rev. 2), the other not (Rev. 1). Do you know what 
Revision you have? They can be identified by the graphics chip on the 
mainboard:

Rev. 1 has an ATI Rage II chip
Rev. 2 has an ATI Rage Pro chip

I do have two Rev.1 beige G3 233/DTs running YDL 3.0.1 - so it is 
possible :) The only bummer is I can not attach additional devices to 
the IDE Buses. It is very well possible though to put a PCI card in the 
machine. I have several machines here at wor that have Promise Ultra100 
controllers - they are supported out of the box with the stock YDL 
kernels.

It could also be possible that the installer expects the CDROM to be a 
master device (like hdc) and not a slave, in case your G3 does allow 
for two devices per IDE bus.

>> The Mac OS *must* be installed within a single partition within the
>> first 8 GB of the boot drive. Is this how you have it set up?
>
>
> Right.  I don't remember how the Drive Utility labels the partitions,
> but I do remember that I specified 2 partitions, the bottom one being
> 30GB and the top one the rest of the HD.  I installed OS 9 into the
> bottom partition.  Maybe the partition should actually be the other
> way around?  And are you saying that partition 1 must be exactly 8GB?

The Drive SetUp Util does list the partitions in order from top to 
bottom. So the top partiton will be the first HFS partiton on the disk, 
the next one the second and so on. As you are installing all the OS9 
drivers in order to be able to boot MacOS 9, there will be some 
additional partitions before the first usable HFS partition on the 
disk.

Depending on which drive setup util you are using this can be as many 
as four or five partitions. So your partitions seen from Linux will 
have higher numbers (sample output from pdisk of a drive partitioned 
with Drive Setup from OS9.1):

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_Driver_IOKit Macintosh           512 @ 192
  5:       Apple_Patches Patch Partition     512 @ 704
  6:           Apple_HFS "Boot_Linux"     204800 @ 1216    (100.0M)
  7:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap             524288 @ 206016  (256.0M)
  8:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 backup          3448560 @ 730304  (  1.6G)
  9:          Apple_Free Extra                10 @ 4178864

Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=4178874 (2.0G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
Drivers-
1:  23 @ 64, type=0x1
2:  36 @ 118, type=0xffff

I was never able to find out, whether the first _usable_ HFS partition 
has to be 8GB or smaller, or has to be _within_ the first 8 GB of the 
drive! I always used less than 8GB for the first partition to be on the 
safe side. Up to untill now, I was under the impression that limit was 
only important when installing OSX, I never tried to install OS9 only 
on a partition >8GB though.


Alexander Holst
Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences
<holst [at] fh-pforzheim [dot] de>
ph: +49 [0]7231 28-6837
fx: +49 [0]7231 28-6040