[ydl-gen] YDL 5 installation on Xserve

[Bill Fink]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Atro Tossavainen wrote:

> > I'd install YDL 5.0.2 onto an external FireWire drive,
> 
> Easier said than done.  YDL 5.0.2 refuses to recognize the external
> FireWire drive (a Maxtor 5000DV) as anything it will agree to install
> to.  I've tried having the drive connected when I boot the machine
> as well as plugging it in afterwards; I've disconnected the internal
> IDE hard drives; I've made sure that sbp2 is loaded, that I see the
> kernel messages related to plugging in the drive, and I've even hand-
> made the b,8,0 /dev entry for sda (which YDL didn't create when it
> loaded sbp2 and the drive was present) so I could run pdisk on it.
> Everything is working fine as far as the hardware goes.  YDL just
> won't play with me.
> 
> I suppose I haven't tried hand-loading sd_mod yet...
> 
> But this is supposed to be Apple...  Easy to work with and no Linux
> nerd tweaking required, right? :-)

Ya, it should be easier, but unfortunately it often isn't.  It seems
you're a fair ways along if you've been able to use pdisk to partition
the external FireWire disk.  You may also need to manually format
the boot partition with hformat, the swap partition with mkswap, and
the root partition with mkfs (or mkfs.ext3).  Then you need to mount
the root partition where the installer expects to find it (it's been
quite a while since I played these kinds of fun and games so I don't
recall what the installer uses as a mount point).  I haven't actually
tried a 5.0.2 install so can't personally vouch for any of this, but
if you can get this far, then you would just continue the install to
install all the desired RPM packages.  After that you could chroot
into the installed system, edit the /etc/yaboot.conf file as described
in the HOWTO, run "ybin -v", and finally hopefully reboot to the
external FireWire disk.  You could then use that as a platform to
construct a bootable root file system on the internal RAID disks.

						-Good luck

						-Bill