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

[Joel Rees]

(Giving a little more detail:)

On Aug 23, 2008, at 12:07 PM, Craig White wrote:

> 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.

Specifically,
a Mac OS 9 partition (I know this is not necessary, but it does make  
the whole lludge more robust.),
two booting Mac OS X partititions (Not case sensitive or journaling  
formatted, 10.2 is too early for that.),
a UFS partition to serve to the web (Required by the configuration of  
one of the Mac OS X systems.),
a UFS swap partition (Not strictly required, but, again, it makes the  
system more robust in my case, if not in the general case.),
a partition intended for sharing with Linux

Actually, I pre-partitioned the yaboot partition and the Linux big  
partition with the Mac OS X utility, as well. And the Mac OS 9 utility.

Well, my memory is a bit confused, since I tried this several times,  
several different ways. I don't remember for sure, but I don't think  
the 1M partions I created with either the Mac OS 9 utility or the Mac  
OS X utility were accepted by the installer as boot partitions for  
yaboot. Don't remember all the ways I tried to get the installer to  
use them, but I couldn't.

>> Fedora 9 happily created lots more partitions,

... when I told it to.

>> 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?)

I think this was due to having more partitions than Mac OS 9 could  
deal with. I think, in one case, Mac OS X did boot, in

>> 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.

Different requirements. I need to take time out to learn how to  
program for ODF and PDF, so I can build programs that will do some  
things I presently use AppleWorks documents to accomplish. Until  
then, I need to be able to do a lot of work in the Mac OS.

> 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.

It's slightly more robust to put Mac OS 9 on a separate partition. My  
kids like to play a game called Bugdom that only exists in a Mac OS 9  
version, and I've seen that game do funny things to Mac OS 9, so I'm  
a little superstitious about it. I may not absolutely need to, but  
cutting the partitions again will require me to install from scratch  
again, and I won't have time for that for a while.

> 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.

Yeah, being able to boot both Linux and openbsd would be nice. Might  
be worth a tradeoff or two.

> 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.

That's why I experimented with only installing Fedora, but I got  
stuck at the problem with making a partition small enough for yaboot.

Anyway, if there is an openfirmware incantation that I can use  
instead of installing yaboot, I could try that the next time I have  
time to work on this.

Hate to be noisy, but I sure appreciate any pointers I can get.

Joel Rees