(Giving a little more detail:)
On Aug 23, 2008, at 12:07 PM, Craig White wrote:
On Sat, 2008-08-23 at 09:58 +0900, Joel Rees wrote:
I recently tried installing Fedora 9 on an iBook that I need to boot both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on. I also have some other partitioning constraints, so I ended up with 6 partitions before I started the Fedora 9 install.
Specifically, a Mac OS 9 partition (I know this is not necessary, but it does make the whole lludge more robust.), two booting Mac OS X partititions (Not case sensitive or journaling formatted, 10.2 is too early for that.), a UFS partition to serve to the web (Required by the configuration of one of the Mac OS X systems.), a UFS swap partition (Not strictly required, but, again, it makes the system more robust in my case, if not in the general case.), a partition intended for sharing with Linux
Actually, I pre-partitioned the yaboot partition and the Linux big partition with the Mac OS X utility, as well. And the Mac OS 9 utility.
Well, my memory is a bit confused, since I tried this several times, several different ways. I don't remember for sure, but I don't think the 1M partions I created with either the Mac OS 9 utility or the Mac OS X utility were accepted by the installer as boot partitions for yaboot. Don't remember all the ways I tried to get the installer to use them, but I couldn't.
Fedora 9 happily created lots more partitions,
... when I told it to.
but then Mac OS 9 (and X, IIRC) refused to boot. Couldn't recognize the format of the disk. (Might have helped if I had got a 120 G HD instead of a 160 G HD?)
I think this was due to having more partitions than Mac OS 9 could deal with. I think, in one case, Mac OS X did boot, in
Also, on a separate iteration, when I tried to force the yaboot partition to 1MB, that also apparently made the partition map unacceptable to Mac OS 9.
I had to wipe the disks with the Mac OS 9 formatter and start again. (Lost a day or so of my time, but no data.) Since I thought I had time, I tried an install of just Fedora, but the current partitioning software wouldn't create the partition for yaboot any smaller than 16MB, IIRC, and then it wouldn't install yaboot in anything bigger than 1MB.
I am currently successfully multi-booting Mac OS 9 & X (Jaguar) and openBSD, but openBSD is not using yaboot. I give the four-finger salute on startup and type "boot hd:,ofwboot /bsd" at the open firmware prompt. That doesn't really bother me, even though I have to remember that the keyboard map is US and doesn't match the Japanese keyboard. :-/
openBSD seems to take a little more nursing than I currently have time for, and I am primarily interested in getting the Gimp and openoffice.org running. Well, probably some of the edutainment stuff, as well.
In about two weeks, one of the partitions will be freed, so I should have three partitions to give Fedora 9, and I am thinking of trying again. But I won't have the day or so necessary to re-build the Mac OS 9/X sides of things if the Fedora partitioning software makes the map unreadable to Mac OS 9 again. So, I am wondering a couple of things:
One, Is anyone is currently successfully multi-booting Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and Fedora 9 on any system, especially one with a boot HD larger than 120G?
Two, would it be possible to boot with openBSD's approach, invoking an openfirmware script on the Mac OS 9 boot disk? (I haven't been able, yet, to untangle the web of what happened when yaboot became usable.)
I haven't done multi-boot Mac's but I have done a bunch of different Mac setups. I'm not really a fan of multi-boot on any hardware choice.
Different requirements. I need to take time out to learn how to program for ODF and PDF, so I can build programs that will do some things I presently use AppleWorks documents to accomplish. Until then, I need to be able to do a lot of work in the Mac OS.
Anyway...I'm not sure why you would want or if you can have separate boot partitions for Mac OS 9 and OS-X and wonder why you would want to do that because if you create an HFS partition for both OS-9 (Classic) and OS-X you would normally keep them on the same setup and use the control panel 'Startup Disk' to choose which would boot.
It's slightly more robust to put Mac OS 9 on a separate partition. My kids like to play a game called Bugdom that only exists in a Mac OS 9 version, and I've seen that game do funny things to Mac OS 9, so I'm a little superstitious about it. I may not absolutely need to, but cutting the partitions again will require me to install from scratch again, and I won't have time for that for a while.
Use the Disk Utilities option on Mac OS-X install to create the partition for OS-X/Classic and leave appropriate 'unpartitioned' space for BSD and/or Linux.
Yeah, being able to boot both Linux and openbsd would be nice. Might be worth a tradeoff or two.
I would expect that if you install Fedora last, it will handle the installation of yaboot/yaboot.conf for you and give you all of the startup options.
That's why I experimented with only installing Fedora, but I got stuck at the problem with making a partition small enough for yaboot.
Anyway, if there is an openfirmware incantation that I can use instead of installing yaboot, I could try that the next time I have time to work on this.
Hate to be noisy, but I sure appreciate any pointers I can get.
Joel Rees