mounting hfs+ partitions in yellowdog, and vice versa

[yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

Hi

Since the day before yesterday I have a dual boot YDL 3.0 and
Mac OS X Apple iBook, with [contrary to yellowdog's explicit advice]
the OS X partition (HFS+) first, then the Linux partition.
[weak excuse: I did the partitioning before reading the manual;
and someone told me it didn't really matter].

I use yaboot.

Everything works more or less fine.

Hoever, fdisk -l does not work: it says

Disk /dev/hda doesn't contain a valid partition table

and won't tell me anything about the partitions.

According to /etc/fstab, /dev/hda4 is the swap partition,
/dev/hda5 is the linux root partition. I think that
/dev/hda3 is boot though it isn't listed in fstab.

I can mount /dev/hda2 as type hfs and I get to see files
Desktop DB, Desktop DF, Finder, ReadMe, System
The file ReadMe kindly informs me that this is what happens
when one looks at an apple extended partition as if it were
not extended. So I suppose this is my main OS X partition.

Question 1: is it possible to mount hfs+ partitions with YDL
and is it possible to fix things so that fdisk sees everything?

The live linux cdrom knoppix-MiB-ppc has no trouble at all mounting
this extended hfs, so YDL ought be able to do it too.

Question 2: is it possible to mount the linux partition from OS X?
OS X can't see it in the finder.

There is one more strange thing, connected to the swap partition.
Among the start up messages I get:

Activating swap points       swapon    invalid argument    [FAILED]

and

Enabling local file system   swapon    invalid argument    [FAILED]

I can't find which scripts are being run for this in rc5.d
(should  I be looking somewhere else?)

Question 3: is the swap space working, how can I fix this?

Question 4: would everything be solved if I started all over,
erase and repartition my hard disk, with first YDL and then OS X ...

Looking forward to your help!
Richard