I just intstalled Debian Etch on an ancient G3 iMac. Debian works great on it, considering the specs. The problem is I can't get OS 9 to boot anymore.

I configured yaboot to list macos as /dev/hda7 and ran ybin, but when I try to boot it I just get the Mac question mark. When I boot off a Mac install CD, it no longer recognizes the Mac partition. But I know it's still there because I can mount it under Debian and view the contents.

So it seems Debian's installer does something that keeps the Mac from recognizing the system disk. Any ideas?

I don't know Mac, but had some time on my hands and found this Gentoo/Mac page that sure has allot of Q & A in this area, I copied the url at a point in the page that mentions how to reconfigure yaboot.conf and also an alternate method of booting highlighted in green.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml#fixit

In the section "When I rebooted, yaboot didn't work! Now, I'm stuck. How can I fix this?"

Lots of good info there, Jr.H, but unfortunately I couldn't find my problem discussed. I got Yaboot installed and configured correctly -- when I hit l it loads linux, when I hit c it boots from CD-rom, and when I hit m it attempts to boot OS 9. I think my problem happens when I repartition my disk for the Linux install. Once I do that, the Mac can no longer find the HFS or HFS+ volumes.

There's no utility to check and repair an HFS file system?, or it doesn't find the HFS file system neither. Well because I don't know OS x, I did learn a few things with my spare time.

The only one I have is Disk First Aid, which comes on the Mac install software CD. I ran that and it didn't find any errors. Norton makes Disk Doctor for Macs, but I don't have that. The Mac software sees the HFS partitions as "unknown" type.

BTW, I've also tried clearing the PRAM and and resetting the firmware, but neither has any effect. I've uninstalled and reinstalled OS9 and Linux three or four times, with the same results every time.

Probably just a simple thing like changing the routine or a different step missing. That's not really all that bad, a little frustrating maybe, but persistence pays. I had to re-install Fedora over 100 times both from fresh off the disc and using images of the fresh install which cuts installation time down to 8 minutes on my system before I got my modem to connect properly to the internet. Had to manually download a few choice updates and apply them manually before it happened. Now it only sees action once or twice a week when I check for updates, because of Etch, which sees all the action now.

When you use cfdisk in linux you can choose the partition type.
Which type did you choose for the HFS partition?
Post the output of: fdisk -l

Actually, if I use cfdisk to create an HFS partition, the Mac installer won't recognize it. I have to create the HFS partitions with the Mac disk utility on the Mac install disk. When I do this, everything works fine on the Mac side. I can then boot with the Mac install disk and the HFS volume shows on the desktop. But after I install Debian (or Ubuntu), if I boot with the Mac install disk, the icon no longer shows and I can't even mount the volume. The disk utility shows it as unknown type.

I'm away from the Mac right now so I can't post the fdsik output, but both fdisk and gparted both show it as HFS or HFS+.

When I've had partition problems with ix86 machines, I've been able to fix them by using plain old fdisk rather than the graphical partitioners, so I tried using mac-fdisk to remake all the partitions, but that didn't work either.

When I get home, I'll be able to post my fdsik output.

Hmm. Try wading through this: http://penguinppc.org/bootloaders/ya...k-basics.shtml
I'm not a mac user, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt, but I don't see your HFS partition. Is it supposed to be hda7? Try booting the mac install disk and change the type to HFS.
I suppose you're using HFS instead of HFS+.

makuyl, you're right -- hda7 is the HFS partition. It's listed as NewWorld bootblock instead of HFS or HFS+ (I'm pretty sure it's HFS+; I used plain old HFS in a previous install to see if that would make a difference.) It's listed wrong on the table.

Unfortunately, the Mac drive setup utility can't change an individual partition type. It can only initialize the entire disk and let you set up new partitions. So when I do that I have to re-install both OS9 and Linux.

Your link said the Linux partitions should come before the HFS partitions, so next time I blow out the disk I'll try it that way. I'll have to wait a couple of days till I can get a day off work because it takes a lot of time to install two OSes.

I'll report back when I'm through. I'll also try the mac-fdisk i command to clear the partition table. Can't hurt, I guess.

I have the same problem on a similar setup. Mine is an iBook SE (Graphite G3/300). I first partitioned the disk with Drive Setup. I created 4 partitions, and installed Mac OS 9 on the last one. Then I installed Debian Etch. At the partitioning step, I deleted those first 3 partitions and used the resulting free space for guided partitioning, resulting in the following:

At the Yaboot step, no other OS was found. However, once Debian booted, I was able to mount the Mac partition, and it did still contain my Mac OS 9 installation. I edited /etc/yaboot.conf to add macos to the boot menu, ran ybin and rebooted. This resulted in a new menu which included macos, but choosing it gave me the dreaded flashing question mark floppy disk icon. I had to use command control power to reboot.

My yaboot.conf file contains:

I attempted resetting the PRAM (booting with command option p r) without luck. I also tried to repair it using Disk First Aid, but DFA did not recognize any Mac partitions. I have tried this with hfs+ (Mac OS Extended) as well to no avail, and I too am at a loss as to where to go from here. I do have some time to work with though, so if anybody has any likely ideas, shoot them at me. Thanks.

sdp

This is not a yaboot problem. The partitioner is what's borking the partition map. Here is how I circumvented the problem, and got my iBook dual-booting. Total time for this procedure (not including coming up with it) was about 4 hours.

Part 0: Acquire documentation.

It is frustrating to need a manpage and not be able to get to it. At least print out (or otherwise give yourself access to) the manpage for mac-fdisk. This is where you are most likely to deviate from what I did, and if you do, you may want the docs. If you are extremely risk averse, consider printing the manpage for every command listed here. If you have another computer available with the operative documentation installed, you're good to go.

Part 1: Install Debian Etch on a memory stick:

As part of a previous attempt to fix this, I had installed the base and standard system on a USB memory stick. It's not bootable on my system, and it was very slow to install, but I did use it in this procedure, so I recommend doing the same before you start this. If you know a better way, use it (and post it).

Part 2: Mac OS 9:

Start up with the Mac OS 9 install CD. Use 'Drive Setup' to partition the drive into 4 partitions. The last one should be 'Mac OS Extended'. (Standard may also work.) The first three should all be 'Unallocated'. The sizes don't really matter as long as they add up to the same sum as what you want for your boot, swap, and root partitions. Install Mac OS 9 on its partition, including the reboot and Setup Assistant.

Part 3: Install Debian Etch on the hard drive:

Insert the memory stick in the USB port and boot from the Debian Install CD. Start the install with the expert option. Perform the first several steps of the install through and including 'Detect disks'. DO NOT 'Partition disks'; instead 'Execute a shell'. The idea here is to do the things that would have been done in the 'Partition disks' step without using the default partitioner, and thereby avoid the problem.

In my case, I put Linux on the drive hda. If you have made a different choice, adjust accordingly. I start up an alternate partitioner with 'mac-fdisk /dev/hda'.

Print the partiton map to see what you have, i.e. issue the 'p' command. In my case, partitions 9, 10 , and 11 are the ones I'm going to use for Linux, and partition 12 is the one that contains Mac OS 9.

I now delete the middle one of the 3 Linux partitions with 'd 10'. Issuing another 'p' command shows that this has had the effect of combining the 3 free partitions.

Now, I start making partitions. The 'b 9p' command creates a new bootstrap partition at the beginning of the free space. Issuing another 'p' command shows that the bootstrap is now partition 9 and the free space is now partition 10.

Now, I create a swap partition with 'c 10p 192M swap'. I used 192 MB for swap, but the size doesn't matter. Issuing another 'p' command shows that the swap is now partition 10 and the free space is now partition 11.

I want to use the remaining space for my root file system so I issue the command 'c 11p 11p root'. Issuing another 'p' command shows me the result.

Since I'm happy with the partition map, I write it to the disk with 'w', confirm with 'y', and quit with 'q'. Here is the operative portion of the map:

The next step is to put a file system on the root partition. The utility 'mkfs' wasn't available, so I used it off the stick. First 'mkdir /stick' to make a place to mount the stick. (In my case the system on the stick was on /dev/sda3. Use 'mac-fdisk -l' to find out this info on your system. In my case, it scrolled off the screen before I could read it. If that happens to you, try 'mac-fdisk -l /dev/sda', and if necessary keep poking around until you find
it.) Then to find out what to mount issue the command 'ls -l /dev/sda3' to find out where it points. In my case it was 'scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3'. Now mount the stick with 'mount -t ext3 /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3 /stick'. This gave me access to 'mkfs' to make the root filesystem; '/stick/sbin/mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda11' does the trick. Out of an abundance of caution I 'umount /stick'.

The next step is to mount the partition where the installer wants it to be. First create the target location with 'mkdir /target'. Then find out where the device points with 'ls -l /dev/hda11'; in my case it was 'ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part11'. Then mount the partition with 'mount /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part11 /target'. You're done, so 'exit' to go back to the installer.

Start with 'Configure time zone' and continue. At 'Configure the clock' answer <No>. At 'Install base sytem' DO NOT 'Partition disks'; instead choose <Go Back> -- repeatedly if necessary. When yaboot loads, it will not recognize Mac OS 9. We add that in a later step. At 'Finish installation' it will once again ask you to 'Partition disks'; DO NOT do this. Instead choose <Go Back>.

Part 4: Clean up

When you boot your new system, some things still aren't quite right. First, you will get a warning that /etc/fstab does not contain the fsck passno field; this just means that it's not configured at all. So the first thing you should do is log in as root, edit it ('nano /etc/fstab'), and fix it. In my case, I like to automatically mount my mac partition as well so I did 'mkdir /mac' first. Here's my fstab (in part) as a sample:

Once you've saved that and gone back to the shell, you'll also need to get your swap working
with 'mkswap /dev/hda10' and then 'swapon -a'. Then you can mount everything correctly with
'mount -a'.

Now you'd probably really like to be able to boot into Mac OS 9. You'll need to edit
/etc/yaboot.conf to add that and then run 'ybin' to activate it. Here's my yaboot.conf (in part)
as a sample:

Now you should be able to boot into either Linux or Mac OS 9. If you have to reinstall Mac OS 9 after this, the startup changes; it still works, but it's weird. You can fix that by rerunning ybin.

Good luck.

sdp