Re: B&W G3 + Yellow Dog... close, but not bootin' yet.

[Sam Pogany <samp@pogany.net>]

On Oct 25, 2005, at 12:06 AM, Ethan Benson wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 08:35:54PM -0400, Sam Pogany wrote:
>> ........
>>             I'm tempted to change disk setup so I'm installing
>> everything onto ultra0/hda,
>>             but if I'm going to that much trouble, I'm going to add
>> bigger drive.
>
> at this stage I think that is all I can reccommend, I cannot see
> anything else wrong that would cause your setup to fail, I am
> beginning to think that perhaps slave disks are flaky in this version
> of OF.   More I think about it the more I vaguely remember hearing
> about such flakyness in the past...
>

Followup on the B&W G3 Yellow Dog/yaboot/no-boot problem:

Decided not to wait for the new drive after all.  To test the idea  
that the no-boot problem might be cause by trying to boot from the  
slave drive on this machine, I took the simple approach.  Took out  
the 2 drives, reversed the jumper settings and switched positions.   
The original master drive was now in slave position, the slave drive  
on which I had installed YDL was now the master.

OSX booted with no problem.  Linux would not boot from master drive  
after the switch though, either from disk or using 'linux rescue'  
from installer CD.  The error during boot process was 'Bad super  
block! Magic number wrong'.  I'm guessing the fstab file was now  
wrong, but I didn't work on it a long time.  What I did was re- 
install Yellow Dog onto the same 3 partitions (now hda2,  hda4, hda5)  
on the same (now master) drive, re-formatting them at the same time.

What happened was:  install went smooth, boot files were installed  
onto the Apple_Bootstrap partition, first stage bootloader ran at  
restart, pressed 'l' for Linux and... IT WORKED!  Booted YDL from the  
master drive (hda) first time out, no manual changes to config file  
or OF needed.

Looks like you were right, something with this machine keeps the  
bootloader from working correctly on the slave drive.  I've been  
trying to get Linux to boot from that drive for weeks, installed  
different distros, played with Open Firmware, hacked the yaboot.conf  
file every which way, nothing worked until I put the YDL install on  
the master disk.

This probably isn't a perfect test situation.  It'd be more definite  
if I hadn't had to reinstall.  But maybe someone else with this  
machine can save themselves some time by trying this.  Thanks for the  
suggestions and taking the time to talk about this, Ethan.  It helped  
me hone in on the last variable.  Now all I gotta do is figure out  
Linux!

Sam
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