Old World Mac install woes

[Tom Marsh]

I'm installing YDL 2.3 on my Power Macintosh 6500/250 with 32 meg of 
RAM and a 4 gig hard disk. (I know, the RAM tally leaves something to 
be desired. It's on order....)

Per the instructions, I first wiped the drive, and created several 
partitions. The space I intended to use for Linux was declared 
"unused." The second chunk of disk space is formatted HFS and contains 
MacOS 9.1. This is per the doc, mind you, which specifies that MacOS 
NOT be the first partition on the disk if you have to use BootX.

In the YDL installer, I defined my linux partitions in the "unused" 
space as follows...

/boot      10 mb
/              3 gig
swap     256 meg

After I commit these changes, the installer attempts to begin 
formatting the various linux partitions. At this point, the installer 
tells me a fatal error has occurred, then it freezes and the machine 
reboots. Completely. Every single time.

Making this problem EVEN more frustrating is that you can't (documented 
bug from ydl.com) format partitions created outside the YDL isntaller 
session. SO... To attempt this again I have start the installer again, 
delete the old partitions, then re-start the machine, then re-start the 
installer again to re-create the linux partitions.

Has anybody else encountered this? Must all linux partitions exist 
contiguously on the disk? Right now, the order is /boot, /, MacOS, then 
swap. Is this my problem?