Re: MacOSX & Debian dual boot questions...

[Michael]

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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]