[ale] PPCQ: Trailing edge issues (longish - sorry)

[Robert Story]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:06:37 -0500 (EST) John wrote:
JM> I want to install Yellow Dog Linux in one of the old, 'Bondi blue' G3-266
JM> iMacs and I am having trouble getting it to boot from the CD for
JM> installtion. I think I may have a recognized, but unusable boot sector
JM> from an aborted installation attempt. On startup, the box gives the
JM> patterned, gray boot screen with a small blinking '?' icon. ('Unbootable
JM> drive' saith the manual.)
 [...]
JM> I do still have the original 4 GBy drive with its MacOS-9.x untouched. I
JM> have tried the user-manual approaches of starting the box while holding
JM> 'c' down, holding 'C' down, or while holding 'Ctrl/Shift/Command/Delete',
JM> to no avail. Neither of these will work with our faithful, working
JM> MacOS-8.6 iMac, either, so maybe I'm not using the right magic.

Holding down 'c' should work. Did you try that w/a Mac Install CD?

JM> HDD is a 'generic' 11 GBy Maxtor ATA that never had Mac software. It did
JM> have a VFAT filesystem and a Linux Reiser filesystem when I started the
JM> project, which may be my problem. I could remove all existing partitions
JM> by putting it into a generic PC and running 'fdisk' if that's the best
JM> answer, but the lazy engineer would rather not pull the drive again. &8-)

In the latest FC4/5 release, I've seen people bit by this. Linux will
recognize a PV partition map and use it, but the mac won't see it. You need to
use something to zap it and put in a mac-style parition map. Easiest would be
to re-init the drive using a Mac boot disk.

JM> Any suggestions from the PPC side of the Linux house?

Have you checked the YellowDog site?

You may also want to consider trying FC4/5 PPC.

BTW, There is an irc channel for ydl and fedora-ppc on freenode...