First, I'm a total Linux nOOb, so please excuse my lack of knowledge.

My Mac is a G4-400 with 512Mb RAM. It is totally stock, except for the harddrive. It now has a Maxtor 6Y060L0 60Gb harddrive, divided into 6 equal partitions (a little under 10Gb each).

I am running Mac OS 9.2.2, fully updated, installed on the first partition. I am trying to install Mandrake 8.2 PPC, so that I will have a dual-boot system. I read that you're supposed to put Linux at the end of your drive, so I allotted the sixth partition for it.

I bought Mandrake 2.8 PPC (two disks) from cheapbytes.com. My difficulty (and subsequent problem) came when I had to do the partitioning and formatting.

I erased my 6th Mac partition, then tried to set-up the Linux partitions. I tried to let it do it's "automatic" partitioning, but that method didn't install a bootstrap. So, I tried to set up the partitions manually, though I'm a Linux nOOb and knew that I probably wouldn't do it right.

I got through the rest of the installation and rebooted. When yaboot came up, it said:

"ultra:15,/vmlinuz-2.4.18-6.1mdk: Unknown or corrupt filesystem"

I tried the installation two more times, trying slightly different things with the partitioning, but got the same error (as above) each time.

I did a Google search to see if I could find others who experienced the same problem, and find-out what I'd done wrong. I found a couple of articles where people explained that others had partitioned incorrectly, thus causing this error message, but the "knowledgeable" people didn't explain how it SHOULD be done PROPERLY.

So now you know where I'm at. So at this point, my questions are:

1) Considering that my harddrive has 6 partitions (plus several very small partitions which the Mac OS puts at the front of the drive), should I still be putting Linux on the last ~10Gb of the drive, or would it be better to put it on the second ~10Gb partition, right behind the Mac OS system partition?

2) From what I've read, I need a total of four Linux partitions within the ~10Gb allotted space. Is that correct? Here is how I last configured them:

hbd15 ... /boot ... Apple_Bootstrap (0x401) ... bootstrap

hbd16 ... / ... Apple_UNIX_SVR2 (0x83) ... Linux Native

hbd17 ... swap ... Apple_UNIX_SVR2 (0x82) ... swap

hbd18 ... /home ... Apple_UNIX_SVR2 (0x83) ... Linux Native

Is this the best, correct way to do it? If not (and I doubt it is), how EXACTLY should this be done? Please include the Mount Point, Type, and Name information in your explaination, as I'm completely new to this.

I know this was lengthy, but I wanted to make sure I was clear and thorough so that you would have adequate information to be able to answer.

I appreciate any help that you can give, as I'm stumped at this point, and cannot find the answers through searching.

Thank You.

Seems right, but Linux on the Mac is in my experience significantly more trouble than Linux on x86. You may need to hunt down a mac-specific forum for this.