Clive Menzies wrote:
On (16/03/05 07:18), Daniel E. Jonsen wrote:
I have Debian and Panther on a G4/350, but I have the luxury of having 2
internal HDs, which might be more difficult with a PowerBook. Anyway, I
first installed Panther on hdb and used Disk Utility to wipe hda clean of
all partitions. Then I unplugged hdb so that there was no way the Debian
installer could *$!@ with it, and installed from a set of 14 Sarge testing
CDs. After reconnecting hdb, the small bootstrap partition on hda is still
the first blessed partition on the system, so yaboot is loaded first and I
get the dual-boot menu.
The main reason I'm writing this note is because I got into a little bit of
nastiness when I needed to upgrade OS 9, which I use 99% of the time from
the Classic environment in Panther. In order to update QuickTime in OS 9,
I had to use the "Startup Disk" control panel and choose the OS 9 system
folder to reboot into pure OS 9. The problem is that this process
"unblessed" the bootstrap partition on hda, and I no longer had the
dual-boot menu to get into Linux.
I found a "bless" shell command in Panther, but found its man page
confusing and I didn't really want to fry my whole system. I'm not even
sure if this command would bless a non-Apple OS partition, anyway. So I
booted from the first Debian install CD, started the installer, and went
through to the partitioning phase. At that point, I chose manual
partitioning, and told it NOT TO TOUCH any of the existing Linux (or
Panther) partitions except swap, then went to the next step, which is, I
think, the point where you must give the final OK to install the base
system. At this point, I kept selecting "Go Back", until I had the option
to abort the installation, which I did. After that, I rebooted, and voila!
the bootstrap partition was re-blessed, and I had my dual-boot menu
back. Phew.
I admit that the process is a little hairy, and I probably wouldn't have
done it if I had anything really important on that machine. Does anyone
out there know of a "less hairy" way to reliably re-bless a bootstrap
partition? New-world macs, as far as I know, won't boot from an external
USB floppy drive, so the only way I can think of is to make a bootable
Debian CD with yaboot on it, set to boot the root partition on the HD. Any
hints on how one would create such a "rescue disk"?
>From memory, I'm pretty sure that resetting the PRAM will put
everything back to where it was: Apple+Alt+P+R as you boot up; hold them
down through a couple of chime sequences and it should take you back to
the yaboot menu.
HTH
Clive
I hardly ever use classic, but I do boot into OS 9 a lot for games.
Now in setting this system up on a dual boot from one physical drive
with multiple partitions, one being OS 9 alone would I run into that
problem if I went through system preferences to set the startup
partition, and if so would it just be a better option for me to just
hold option at boot to manually select the OS 9 partition in the
instances I boot to 9?
--Mike
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