yaboot issues on a dual-drive/boot g4

[chris panagakis]

it took me a whole week to beat down all of the evil bugs that popped 
up trying to make my dual g4 500 a functioning dual boot/dual drive 
system.  i've got ydl 3.0.1 running happily on the ata drive connected 
to the motherboard's bus and os x (10.2.8) humming along on the ata 
drive connected to a separate ata133 bus.  both drives are designated 
and recognized as "master" on their respective busses.  i tried putting 
them on the same bus with the linux drive as master and the os x drive 
as slave, as recommended in a ydl howto, but the os x drive was 
unwilling to boot in that configuration.

but all is not well.  even though each os will run happily when chosen 
from the apple boot menu (the one you get when you hold "option" down 
at startup), yaboot isn't able to successfully load os x.  linux works 
like a charm, though.  i checked the os x drive with pdisk to make sure 
that the partitioning was correct (the first partition on the os x 
drive is "Apple_partition_map").  i fiddled with the yaboot.conf to try 
all of the partitions on the os x drive as boot targets.  and yet, 
nothing.  trying to boot os x from yaboot just gives a quick flicker to 
a gray screen, and then i'm right back at the yaboot prompt.

anyone else had an issue like this or have any ideas?