multibooting ppc with Mac OS 9 & X on an ancient iBook

[Craig White]

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.
> 
> Fedora 9 happily created lots more partitions, 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?)
> 
> 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.

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.

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. 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.

Craig