Although I already had Ubuntu 8.04 running pretty well on my PowerBook G4/1.33 Al, I decided to get fancy and install a second Linux. I made some free space available and installed Yellow Dog 6.0. It loaded all right except for no AirPort, but access to Ubuntu was lost from the bootloader (yaboot). I'm a Linux newbe, but I experimented, trying to paste in what I thought were the right commands in yaboot.conf, with no success. Finally, I erased the YDL and put the new openSUSE 11 on instead. While this version is pretty slick, I not only lost access to Ubuntu from the yaboot options one gets at startup, but also to MacOSX. I played with it further, trying to add Ubuntu and MacOSX back to the yaboot menu, but the commands I added to yaboot.conf didn't produce the desired result. I still had MacOSX access, but through open firmware or starting up with the option key. Finally, I screwed everything up with some command I entered in the yaboot.conf file, and now I can't even access openSUSE. The command resulted in some error shown at bootup, and I had no way to access any Linux to fix it. I'm away from home this week and I need the PowerBook, so I changed the startup disk in OSX, knowing this act would completely remove the yaboot menu from startup access. I assume I can do something about this when I get home and have access to the Ubuntu/openSUSE install disks, but is there anything I can do without them to get access to the yaboot menu from MacOSX (Leopard) and remove the faulty command?

Please please please write in paragraphs - it makes it so much easier to read your posts.

OK - you have a Mac - PowerBook G4/1.33 Al - and you want to multi-boot.
Howto customizo YaBoot

This bit seems to be the crux of the question:
Shure - access the partition and edit yaboot.conf with a text editor. Though you'll need to add it yaboot again - and I don't know if you can do that from OSX.

You can download, burn and execute a Live CD ( http://sourceforge.net/project/downl...o.bz2&86728941 ) and then reinstall the boot loader (not the system). If you install a GRUB boot loader (I don't know if it's possible for Mac), it will auto detect your systems.

Thanks for both of your answers. Simon, I apologize for that run-on paragraph post, except I could swear that I put it into paragraphs. At any rate, thanks for wading through it.

I hadn't thought about the problem of putting yaboot back because I didn't know that what I did destroyed it. I thought I just disabled it somehow.

emi_ramo, I am downloading the file you pointed me to as I type this. I'll just need to find a shop where I can buy a CD to burn. What you said about Grub is interesting - it will autodetect all Linuxes and make a bootloader that will access them automatically? That would be rather useful! Anyone know if this works on a Mac?

Am I correct to assume that even if the yaboot bootloader is resurrected with the Ubuntu disk I'm downloading, I'll still have to find a way to add access to openSUSE on it if I want both systems to boot (as well as the Mac)?

I tried this with the Ubuntu Live CD for the PPC, but it just goes into installation mode and there was no obvious way to get it to reinstall the bootloader. From what I can tell, the partition for the bootloader is still there, but the PowerBook doesn't recognize it at startup.

Someone in another forum suggested a utility called TestDisk. I read the instructions on TestDisk, and this looks like it might work. BUT, it suggests for my problem that I use pdisk to initialize the disk, and that doesn't sound right. In Mac language, initialize means destroy everything on it. Does it mean something else in Linux?

If you want to reinstall bootloader, you must execute it for your self. As I tell before, I don't know if GRUB will do the job for your Mac. There is an special boot loader recovery disk. Try it:

http://www.supergrubdisk.org