Just curious

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

It shouldn't really matter which partition is the yaboot partition because
the ybin command points OpenFirmware to it. That's the purpose of the
boot= line. The drive hda begins with an obsolete 512-byte structure
called the Driver Descriptor Map. It is immediately followed by the hda1
partition, which is always analogous to the MBR. Although this partition
has provisions for containing boot code, it doesn't have enough space for
yaboot, so a method somewhat similar to installing in the superblock is
used. Only this "superblock" ends up being a separate partition. It just
turned out to be much easier that way. I suspect that something is
peculiar about your OS9 install, but I would pretty much need physical
access to your machine to confirm my suspicions. However, if you e-mail me
your phone number and a good time to call, I can try to interactively rule
out a few things.

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 22:12:13 -0400, GDB-B&W-YDL3.0.1 wrote:

> In an effort to understand what is happening when yaboot starts my
> computer, I have looked at the partition map of the HD (80 Gb Maxtor
> IDE)  and found the following.  hda1-8 are all less than 1 Mb and take
> up the first 2 sectors of the HD.  Next there is a 128 Mb free space.
>  hda10 is an hfs+ partition and is 31011 Mb in size.  This is my OSX
> partition.  Then another 128 Mb free space.  hda12 is also an hfs+
> partition and is 5997 Mb in size.  This is my OS9 partition.  hda9 is
> the yaboot hfs partition and is 1 Mb in size.  hda11 is my 1000 Mb linux
> swap partition and hda13 is my 10000 Mb ext3 YDL partition.  This leaves
> 29901 Mb of free space at the end of the drive.  Below is my yaboot.conf
> file:
> 
> boot=/dev/hda9
> device=/pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/pci-ata@1/@0/disk@0:
> init-message="Welcome to Yellow Dog Linux!\nHit <TAB> for boot
> options.\n\n" partition=13
> timeout=30
> install=/usr/lib/yaboot/yaboot
> magicboot=/usr/lib/yaboot/ofboot
> default=yellowdoglinux
> 
> image=/boot/vmlinux-2.4.22-2f
>     label=linux
>     root=/dev/hda13
>     read-only
>     append="hde=ide-scsi"
> 
> image =/boot/vmlinux-2.4.22-2g
>     label = yellowdoglinux
>     root=/dev/hda13
>     read-only
>     apend="hde=ide-scsi"
> 
> macosx=/dev/hda10
> macos=/dev/hda12
> defaultos=macosx
> delay=10
> enablecdboot
> 
> My question is, shouldn't the yaboot partition be at the very beginning
> of the drive?  In other words, what makes the computer go all the way
> down to the hda9 partiton to start?  I feel this is part of the reason
> why I can't boot out of OS9 once I boot into it, but don't understand
> why this doesn't happen when I boot into YDL or OSX.  Sorry if this is a
> newbie type question, but I'm used to PC drives where the MBR resides at
> the beginning of the drive.
> 
> Just a message from Doug...
> 
> 
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