On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 09:15:23PM -0400, Sam Pogany wrote: > > 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. the files on the bootstrap partition would be wrong as well, device= would point to the wrong place etc. you probably also got bit by a root=/dev/hdbX in your yaboot.conf. > 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! The blue&white G3 firmware isn't particularly refined, its certainly better then the oldworld stuff that preceeds it, but Apple only tested and made to work thier default configuration (MacOS 9 on Primary Master with no other disks). I have a blue&white but I have never tested a slave configuration, I don't have any spare disks for that. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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