PB 3400C Woes

[Longman, Bill]

Guys, I have the same system - 48MB PB3400c. I, too, had install problems.
Here's how I got it to install:

1 - Boot off MacOS 9 disk and reformat the drive.
I set the Mac partition to 150MB (which was still way too big. It's slice
8). I made a 64M swap partition on slice 9. Slice 10 I left open for YDL.
All the rest of the honking 2GB monster drive. Here's the pdisk output:

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/hda'
 #:                type name                        length   base    ( size
)
 1: Apple_partition_map Apple                           63 @ 1
 2:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh                       54 @ 64
 3:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh                       64 @ 118
 4:    Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh                       54 @ 182
 5:    Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh                       74 @ 236
 6:  Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh                      512 @ 310
 7:       Apple_Patches Patch Partition                512 @ 822
 8:           Apple_HFS "MacOS/Preferred LinuxPPC"  351546 @ 1334
(171.7M)
 9:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap                        133056 @ 4100544 (
65.0M)
10:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled                   3747664 @ 352880  (
1.8G)

2 - Pare down MacOS. You should have almost none of the MacOS installed
except the disk utility, a text reader and Stuffit.

3 - Put the BootX App in Control Panels, ofboot.b, boot.msg,
ramdisk.image.gz into System Folder. Blah, blah, blah. This is all in the
BootX readme file. You've obviously gotten to here since you're experiencing
problems on install.

4 - Install the system - I made the mistake of trying to do what I do with
every Linux install -- pick the packages I knew I wanted. I got errors every
time I did this. I stopped kicking myself in the head and just chose the X
installer with the default packages. It took, I think, a week and a half to
load. Maybe, not, but on the sixth or seventh go, it sure seemed like it.

5 - Rejoice - YMMV. (Obviously). Once it rebooted, I installed the packages
I needed. PCMCIA is still a pain but I got it to work most of the time.

Caveat - I don't remember if I did this or not but it's worth trying. When
the installer is waiting for your first responses, you can go the the Opt-F2
window and use the swap space.

$ swapon /dev/hda9

ought to do the trick. That gave me an extra 64MB for the poor little gizmo
to use and abuse.

Bill