Installing YDL 3.0 on a Mac G3

[Alexander Holst]

Hi Jeff,

Am 15.06.2004 um 17:19 schrieb Jeffrey Mannion:

> Hey Alex, thanks a lot for your help. I did the partitioning via Pdisk
> and got the bootstrap that YDL was complaining about. After going
> through the rest of the install process, however, the YDL installer 
> hung
> when it began to install packages.

I know, that a lot op people think that the installer hangs when it 
gets to the point of installing the packages - but usually it doesn't. 
It takes a while to copy stutt to the disk and resolve dependancies of 
packages. During that stage it just sits there without telling you 
anything about it. It also depends on the CPU, how long this will take. 
I remember waiting some five to ten minutes on some machine, before it 
actually starts installing the packages.

Take your time and wait - if it takes longer than 10 or 15 minutes, 
then I guess it really got stuck - it never happened for me though, at 
least not at that stage.

> I then tried Linux Mandrake PPC 9.1,
> and went through the installer like a breeze, but then upon reboot was
> left just seeing the Mac folder with a question mark. I went into the
> firmware console, and typed 'setenv boot-device ultra1:2,//:tbxi' to
> which it responded 'ok', but upon a reboot, I still had no operating
> system. Any suggestions?? Im pretty baffled here.

I am not really familiar with Mandrake and its boot process. The only 
thing that surprises me is the "ultra1:2,//:tbxi"

First of all, where did you get the "ultra" part from? Is there some 
sort of a PCI disk controller in the machine? Second, the slashes 
should be backslashes! \\ A proper boot device line looks like (this is 
taken from a 400 MHz G4, so it will not work in your case, just to 
illustrate):

boot-device     pci2/ata-6@D/@0:9,\\:tbxi

I simply reads like: device:partition,fileToLoad - So in this case we 
have an ATA controller on PCI bus 2 [pci2/ata-6@D] with a disk attached 
as master [/@0] and want to load a file of type tbxi off the 9th 
partition [:9,\\:tbxi]

Did you add any disks? If not, simply boot into OF by holding down 
<cmd><alt><O><F>. At the prompt type "printenv" to see the actual 
values and the defaults. Usually, "hd" is an alias to the first disk in 
the machine and should work fine. The default value for booting a Mac 
with an Apple Operating System on it is:

boot-device     hd:,\\:tbxi

In order to avoid several reboot attempts, you can use a command like 
"boot hd:,\\:tbxi" at the promt, instead of setting the boot-device 
variable and reboot - saves some time :). The boot-device variable is 
only used for initially booting up the machine or rebooting it. For 
now, untill you found the right parameters, try booting from within OF 
with:

"boot device:partition,\\:tbxi"

The device part can either be a full OF path to the actual device or an 
alias (i.g. hd, cd, enet ...), the partition part should be the number 
of the partition, where your installer put the boot loader (I have no 
clue, how Mandrake deals with that). Assuming that Mandrake installed 
the boot loader on the second partition of your disk, maybe a command 
like:

"boot hd:2,\\:tbxi"

could work for you. If it does, next time you reboot, don't forget to 
write that into the "boot device" variable, by booting into OF and 
typint "setenv boot-device hd:2,\\:tbxi" at the prompt. Check with 
"printenv" to see if changes were written properly.

To get a bit more info about OpenFirmware and booting from within OF 
try this:

http://www.netneurotic.de/mac/openfirmware.html

It also has some information on how to boot with a bootloader installed 
in the MasterRecord Block of a disk (quik utilizes that feature). Some 
more gengeral information about OF can be found here:

http://diveintoosx.org/OpenFirmware.html

Hope that helps,
Alex



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