Subject: Re: Can't boot into YDL anymore
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Nov 06 2001 - 00:11:32 MST
At 9:30 PM -0800 11/5/01, Ronald Hale-Evans wrote:
>I installed YDL 2.1 yesterday on my iMac Rev. B. Rebooted a couple of
>times, no problem. Left it running YDL overnight, came back, decided
>I'd try the snazzy new Mac-on-Linux version. Noticed there was
>another hard disk icon on the Mac desktop within MOL; opened it. It
>looked like boot magic, so I shrugged my shoulders and assumed that's
>the way MOL does things these days.
>
>When I went to reboot my Mac later, I noticed it was displaying a new
>icon: a file folder with the Mac OS icon superimposed. Then it booted
>directly into Mac OS.
Did it draw the file folder first, then draw the MacOS icon on top of it?
When New World Macs can't boot what they're supposed to for whatever
reason, they draw a folder with a flashing question mark and start
searching available drives for something to boot. When they find
something to boot, they draw an icon to replace the question mark and
start booting. If you have few drives (as is probably the case with
the iMac) it may find something to boot very quickly, so you won't
see the folder by itself for very long (if at all).
>I've been pulling my hair out, booting the 2.0
>rescue CD and editing my yaboot.conf, but ybin aborts with various
>error messages, mostly related to the fact that I'm not running it
>from my boot disk (the CD, obviously).
>
>I've tried holding the option key down when I boot, but I still get
>the file folder, then the happy Mac, then booting into Mac OS. If I
>could only boot into YDL once, I'm sure I could run ybin and
>everything would be fine -- but there's the rub.
>
>Seems to me people were having similar problems with one of the new
>yaboot versions a couple of months ago, but I can't find relevant
>responses (mostly people told them to hold the option key down).
The option key boot menu is only present in the Open Firmware
versions shipped iin later New World Macs. Offhand, I think only
Macs with AGP slots or AGP-based built in video have the menu. But
in any case your iMac rev B is definitely too old to have it.
You'll have to tell Open Firmware to boot your bootstrap partition manually.
1. Turn the computer on and hold down cmd-opt-O-F until it dumps you
to the Open Firmware command prompt.
2. Type the following command:
boot hd:N,ofboot.b
where N is the partition number of the bootstrap partition.
If that doesn't do the trick, there might be something wrong with the
bootstrap partition's contents. If that's the case, you still may be
able to recover, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. :)
Once you get Linux going again you'll probably want to force MOL to
not mount that partition. Unfortunately MacOS will debless the
bootstrap partition if it's allowed to mount it, and depending on how
your OF "boot-device" variable got configured, that may prevent the
Linux boot menu script from loading.
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Nov 06 2001 - 00:23:33 MST