removing yaboot

[yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

> hey, how do i remove the yaboot bootloader, and linux all together?
> especially without wiping out my osx partition... thanks!

what follows are suggestions FROM a newbie so don't expect them
all to be safe or correct. maybe there are much easier/safer ways.
i hope anyone who sees mistakes in what i write below will
correct me, fast!

i'm assuming you're restricted to a single internal hard drive
and a cdrom; if you have another spare drive there are more
possibilities.

i think that if you use the mac osx preference pane to select
your mac osx partition as startup disk, the mac forgets that
it was supposed to use yaboot as bootloader. at least, this
is what happens on mine. after this it would be safe to erase
and reformat linux partitions.

regarding erasing the linux partitions [one for yaboot, one for
swap, one for the root] i would try booting osx from your
mac installation cdrom to see if the mac's disk utility is
available on the cdrom and will recognise the existing
mac partition and allow you to create a new mac partition
out of the rest.

alternatively you could use a live linux-ppc cdrom like knoppix
and use the linux disk partitioning tool "parted" for this job,
at least for deleting the linux partitions, leaving empty space
which mac's disk utility will know how to use.

possibly this can also be done using the yellowdog installation
cdrom no. 1, i read that you can type "install rescue" at the
first prompt when you boot from this cd but i haven't tried this yet.

finally you could buy "hard disk toolkit" from www.fwb.com which is
a disk partitioning tool running under os9. you would have to create
a bootable os9 cdrom with this program on it, in order to be
able to boot from the cdrom and use the program to change
the partitions on your internal hard drive. it is also possible
to create your own bootable osx cdrom with a selection of software
on it using a free program called BootCD.

doing some experiments yesterday i was able create mac os9 and mac osx
rescue disks with disk utilities on them. in particular i managed to
get hard disk toolkit onto a bootable os9 cdrom. i tried it out on
an old mac LC and managed to screw up the hard disk altogether: it
told me it could only repartition the drive after it had updated the
drivers, but this operation failed and the drive was useless afterwards.
but it was rather old too and maybe no good anyway...

good luck
richard