YDL 4.0.1 FireWire drive installation failure

[Jeffrey Paul Burger]

I've been trying unsuccessfully to install YDL 4.0.1 on an external 130GB
FireWire drive from a new Aluminum G4 laptop. I joined YDL Enhanced and
downloaded the four YDK 4.0.1 ISOs including
yellowdog-4.0.1-orion-20050208-install1.iso. I seem to have successfully
burnt the CDs using Toast on OS X. (The YDL installer verified the media on
discs 2-4, but one disc 1 said "Unable to read the disc checksum from the
primary volume descriptor. This probably means the disc was created without
adding the checksum. I didn't perceive this as a deal-breaker). The
installer CD indeed booted with a YDL FireWire logo and showed the FW drive.
The FW drive originally had a single partition formatted for OS X. I told
the installer to partition automatically and remove all partitions so that
the entire drive would be dedicated to Linux.

The installation process concluded with an indication that it was
successful, however the FW drive doesn't show up when I restart or
cold-start holding down the Option key on either the new Aluminum PowerBook
or an older 800MHz Titanium. (FYI, the optical drive on the Ti-book is
flakey, so I can't try installing from that machine even though it will be
my primary host for this FW Linux drive).

After I realized the installation didn't seem effective, I started part of
the way back into the installation process to see what Disk Druid could tell
me and I see /dev/sda broken down into the following:

/dev/sda2 Apple Bootstrap 1 1 1
/dev/sda3 ext3 129951 1 16567
/dev/sda4 swap 1020 16567 16697
/dev/sda5 ext3 100 16697 16710

I'm a relative Linux newbie. Any help would be appreciated.

Jeffrey Paul Burger