Re the open firmware message
complaint, I address it below in a
message I sent to the IOMUG. I hope this
helps.
--------
I have just gone through a four day
installation of Yellow Dog Linux 2.3 (YDL),
sitting alongside OS X and Mac OS 9.2.2
on a strawberry iMac, 333 mhz, with a
third party 30G HD having replaced the
original 6G HD. The goal was to have a
fully functional Mac by having X and 9 for
all Mac software and then to have YDL as
a separate OS to learn Linux. It was
ambitious. It was also grueling and
maddening. I thought others would like to
know of the issues they may face if they
try the same thing.
1) Linux and OS X, both being versions of
UNIX, share a common desire to be
completely installed in the first 8 gigs of
your hard drive. We learned this the hard
way, attempting to install OS X the first
time in the space from 3G to 13G. With
OS X, an error message will pop up
telling you that it has to be within the first
8 G. With YDL, you get no such error
message but it doesn't seem to work
unless it too is completely within the first
8 G. Indeed, the YDL install video,
downloadable off their website, and
which proved to be critically useful, tells
you to put YDL on the very first 3 G of the
hard drive. Funnily enough, it doesn't tell
you to put OS X within the first 8G but we
found that we had to.
2) The YDL video tells you that, after
partitioning your hard drive, to install OS 9
first, then OS X, then YDL. This proved to
be necessary. At one point, we installed
a stripped down version of OS 9, then OS
X, then YDL. When we installed a full
version of 9 later on, nothing would work.
3) The most daunting part of the whole
operation was partitioning the hard drive.
It sounds easy enough....simply boot from
an OS 9 CD, open up Drive Setup, set
aside the first 3G as unallocated (for
YDL), set aside the next 4G as Mac OS
Extended (for OS X), then set aside a
large space, in our case, 14G, for Mac OS
9 as Mac OS Standard, then set aside the
rest as Mac OS Extended for OS X
storage space. Then, initialize and voila.
The problem we experienced is that Drive
Setup doesn't work like it ought to. For
starters, you could specify a volume as
Mac OS Standard and when you come
back to check it after you have formatted, it
kept showing volumes we specified as
Standard as Extended. This was
frustrating as it seems to me that, in this
particular situation, when the volume was
Extended, the attempted bootup of Mac
OS 9 would result in the dreaded "Open
Firmware" message screen, with no way
to go from there. We tried various
commands, mac-boot, bye, and ga, but
the Open Firmware screen wouldn't
budge. The only remedy was to find a
way to reinstall OS 9 on a Mac OS
Standard partition. This was odd to us as
we have run OS 9 on Extended partitions
on other machines. However, in this
particular case, it seemed to want
Standard.
Another fluky thing with Drive Setup is that
you have to specify the size of the volume
first before specifying the type of
formatting. For instance, when I specified
Standard first, then attempted to type in
the volume size of 14000 MB, the dialog
box wouldn't take my size entry. Weird.
But wait, it gets even worse. The worst
part about Drive Setup is that it may
completely transform your entries into
something unuseable. Particularly
maddening was that when we would
specify the first 3G as unallocated for
YDL, then set up the size and types of the
other volumes, the results would be
completly different, always putting the
unallocated 3G at the end of the hard
disk, not the beginning. Remember, YDL
won't work unless it is installed at the
beginning of the hard drive
Weirdly enough, sometimes Drive Setup
would give us 32 MB of unallocated at the
beginning and 2968 MB of unallocated at
the end. We thought that we could work
with this, putting the 10 MB boot in this 32
MB and putting swap and root at the end
of the drive but....nope.....it doesn't seem
to want to work that way. You have to
have your boot, swap, and root all
together, on the first part of the drive.
The solution to our Drive Setup woes was
to use another formatting tool, Speed
Tools Hard Disk Setup. We would do the
initial format with that, setting up 3G for
YDL, the next 4G for Mac OS X, 14G for 9,
then the rest for OS X storage. But, since
this tool only sets up sizes of partitions
doesn't allow you to specify the type of
each partition, we would then have to
open up Drive Setup, take the existing
size partitions and reformat the various
partitions as unallocated, Extended or
Standard. This seemed to work. Drive
Setup would not scramble the size or
placement of the volumes if they had
previously been set up by the other
formatter.
4) If you try this, I highly recommend that
you install Mac OS 9, then burn a CD of
the volume with it. Do the same with Mac
OS X. That way, when you have to go
through installing multiple systems
multiple times, you can save hours of
installing time by simply copying a CD to
a volume instead of having to go through
the whole install process from the install
CDs.
----
Those are the issues as I see them. I
hope it helps someone. BTW, does
anyone know if I can complain to Apple
about Drive Setup? Also, does anyone
have a better drive setup tool that they
would recommend?
mike lasche
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted
time."
