ATA booting problems & solutions

[Benjamin Kite <ajax@ajax.org>]

Solution:

	1. If anybody else is still having trouble with the HFS boot disk
	   locking the keyboard (or not recognizing ADB input) on an old-
	   world macintosh, there is a bootable floppy floating around that
	   fixes this. You can e-mail me if you can't find a copy. I think
	   it was available from http://www.netfall.com/.
Questions:

	1. Is it so odd for the only disk in an oldworld macintosh to come
	   up as /dev/hdb? Is it such a bad thing that it's probably making
	   things confused at boot-time?

	2. I can't seem to boot my linux partition on /dev/hdb2 even though
	   I have (supposedly) both quik and yaboot installed. I've even
	   made sure the bootstrap partition exists and has yaboot files on
	   it. I don't know for sure how to test if quik worked or not.

	3.  Are there any success stories out there? 
	   What is the most explicit device name for one of these drives?
		
		ATA-Disk@x,y:z

	    I've seen a comma in the device tree, but I wonder if that's
	    not a red herring. It seems clear that it's supposed to be
	    x=unit and z=partition number. Is partition 0 the same as the
	    first partition after the partition map? That makes /dev/hdb2
	    come out to "ata/ATA-Disk@1:0". That's not working for me.

Detail:

I have a powerbase 160 and would love to get Linux on it without having to
find a CD-ROM of MacOS that will work with it. They're getting pretty rare.

So I've got an oldworld Mac.

So far, I've got the base debian system installed on the ATA disk. 
Strangely, when I boot the install floppy, the drive appears and effectively
referred to as /dev/hdb. It is my understanding that the first ATA master
would come up as /dev/hda, so this is curious to me.

Secondly, I've tried creating an Apple_Bootstrap partition for yaboot and
a quik bootblock header on my root filesystem, but still don't seem to be
able to boot into the OS without the install system.

I've tried a variety of boot-device setting, including the obvious choices:

ata/ATA-Disk@0:0 (For some reason I thought that this might boot the first
                  bootable partition)

ata/ATA-Disk@0:2 (since the root partition is on /dev/hdb2)
ata/ATA-Disk@0:8 (since the yaboot bootstrap partition is on /dev/hdb8)
	(responds with: "can't LOAD from this device")
	(I assume this means there's no appropriate bootstrap or filesystem,
	 meaning I'm either referring to the wrong partition or I haven't
	 installed the bootstrap mechanism properly)

ata/ATA-Disk@1:2 (since it's /dev/hdb2 and not /dev/hdba2 -- who knows)
ata/ATA-Disk@1:8 ("                                                  ")
	(responds with: "DEFAULT CATCH!, code=FFF00300 at   %SRR0: FF80BFD8   %SRR1: 00008070")
	(I assume this means there's no drive there.)

What to do?
Help appreciated,
Benjamin Kite