Parition Problem on G3 Installtion

[Olaf Olson]

I have a G3 B&W, with two drives. One is 80 Gb and the other is 200Gb. 
The 200 Gb is partitioned into two smaller pieces (It's my wife's 
machine and she won't let me look to see exactly what the sizes are). I 
don't think this is what's causing the problem. Even then, it sounds 
like Stephen is installing on a blank disk. The installer should be able 
to  specify how to partition the entire disk and doesn't need anything 
else to decide what to do with it, unless...

Was the drive already partitioned, using the apple utilities? Even if 
you are planning to erase the entire drive, in favor of a complete YDL 
installation and takeover of the drive, the section of the drive you're 
intending to use must be labeled as unused disk space, in order for the 
installer to deal with it. At least, that's what YDL 3.0 required. I 
suspect that 4 will do the same. I admit that I haven't upgraded, yet.

Olaf

Derick Centeno wrote:

> My memory regarding the G3 is a bit fuzzy but I do recall reading 
> somewhere that the G3 cannot recognize drives large drives ranging 
> beyond 30G.  This is a limitation of the firmware and so there will 
> always be misinformation regarding what it sees and understands.  The 
> work around is to treat huge drives such as you are working with and 
> paritition them so that they are within a range that G3 systems are 
> familiar with -- the size of the drives which were in existence when 
> the G3 was in it's prime.  It may turn out that 30G may be that 
> optimal size, which means that the G3 could be helped to be more 
> efficient by partitioning the 200G drive into chunks 30G wide.
>
> A waste of a hard drive certainly, but older systems have an upper 
> bound limit which they are comfortable with.
>
> This is something to consider if Collin's solution doesn't pan out or 
> work in solving your difficulty.
>
> On Jan 12, 2006, at 10:51 PM, Collin O'Neill wrote:
>
>> How about re-writing the disk label in rescue mode? You can use 
>> parted or fdisk to re-write it.. THIS WILL DESTROY YOUR DATA, so if 
>> you have important data on the disk, back it up first or take another 
>> approach.
>>
>> 1. At the boot prompt, type "linux rescue".
>> 2. Go through the rescue boot procedure.  It will probably ask you 
>> what language you want to speak and your keyboard's nationality.
>> 3. I like parted unless fdisk does something special given the 
>> application, so type
>> "parted [your device here]".  Most likely your device is /dev/hda.
>> 4. Type "mklabel", and specify the "mac" partition table type.
>> 5. Type "p" to see what it's done to your disk.  You should see a 
>> single 0.31MB partition dedicated to Apple bootstrap.
>> 5. - if you want to specify partitions before installation, this is 
>> the place to do it.
>> 6. Otherwise, type "q" to quit and "exit" to reboot and resume 
>> installation.
>>
>> -Collin
>>
>> Stephen Ko wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I've spent several hours trying to install 4.0 on G3 but failed due to
>>> partition problem. When I tried to partition 200GB, for some reason,
>>> YDL reserves almost all the space to apple partition map(I think it
>>> was around 190 GB) which only leaves me with 10 GB to play around
>>> with. Neither the autopartition nor the disk druid seems to do the
>>> trick. So I am pretty much stuck with 10 GB which apple bootstrap,
>>> swap, and / must share.
>>>
>>> Can anyone please tell me what I am doing wrong?
>>> Thank you,
>>> Stephen.
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> yellowdog-newbie at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
>>> http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-newbie
>>>
>>>
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