Partitioning help needed

[dannyman]

I' *still* trying to find a distro that installs and works. Help! This is worse than brain surgery without painkillers.

I'd like to install Debian Woody on my OldWorld PowerMac -- a beige desktop G3/300 with 768 meg RAM, which I upgraded with an XLR8 ZIF to a G4/500.

I'd like to run OSX and OS 9 on the same hard drive as Linux. You Mac folks will remember that, with the beige G3s, OSX must be installed in the first partition of the hard drive, and that first partition must be less than 8 gigs in size.

My hard drive is EIDE, and about 28 gigs. Using OSX Disk Utility, I
created a first partition of 7.9 gigs in HFS+ for OSX; a second
partition of 11 gigs in HFS+ for OS9; a third, small partition of just
32 megs in HFS to run BootX; then a fourth Swap partition of 256 megs in UFS; and finally a fifth Root partition of about 10 gigs in UFS.

Debian begins to install fine, but then can't find or create any Linux partitions. I belatedly discovered that using Apple Disk Utility for partitioning is a bad idea, and Debian will apparently not recognize UFS partitions -- or at least those created by OSX.

Is there any way I can make Debian work now without wiping my hard drive and starting again? Alternately, what partitioning scheme and tool should I use? Am I going about this correctly? Is having all three OSs on my beige G3 even possible? Thanks for any help.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Now, for starters, I know little to nothing about OS X. So, the multi booting issue's going to be something you'll have to deal with yourself. But, I can help you with the partitioning:

If you use a tool called pdisk, you can repartition your system. It's a little awkward to work with at first, but you'll get the hang of it once you realize that a "block" is equal to 512k bytes.

The problem is that the OS X partitioning tool makes UFS partitions, not Linux partitions. UFS partitions are more likened to a partition you'd install FreeBSD on. Here's what you should do:

Use pdisk to delete the other UFS partitions, and recreate partitions of the type UNIX_SVR2. When you install Debian, it will see those partitions, and install to those.

pdisk can be found here (http://cantaforda.com/cfcl/eryk/linux/pdisk/). I think it's only usable under MacOS 9 and below, though...

But, don't give up hope. I have run Linux on 3 Macs now, one of which was a trial to get it onto. If I can run Debian on a Power Mac 8500 and an 8600, you can definitely run it on a beige G3.

[iGuy]

Dannyman:
Debian is a fine distro -- but may i make a suggestion? You might be happier with YellowDog 3.0. It is geared more for mutiple OS's on a single drive.

Here is how with YD 3.0
Partion the drive with OSClassic/OSX. That is start the instalation CD, select Disk Utilities before installing. Partion the drive with at least two partions: at the top freespace for YD, at the bottom whatever you want for OSClassic/OSX as HFS+ If you want to be able to boot into OS9 then you should add a third partion at this point.

Install OSClassic/OSX. Check to make sure everything looks okay.

Boot YD from CD (the hold the 'C' key type boot) YD will launch an installer (anacondra) that will give you a chance to partion the disk MANUALLY using Disk Druid. Using the Free space set up 1MB for Apple Boot at the top (manditory) Then set up / and swap ...etc... with what is left. Don't mess with the HFS+ partion. When you install, if you choose 'desktop,' 'workstation' or 'everything' mol files will be installed. If you manually select, make sureyou install the mol (Mac On Linux) files. When you configure YaBoot make sure to tab up and enter [exactly] "macosx" as a boot label for the HFS+ partion for Linux/OSX dual boot capabilities (And enter [exactly] macos as the label for OS9 if you want to be able to boot into OS9.)

With this setup, you will be able to boot up any OS you want. Plus, you will be able to run mol -- that is run OSX (OS9) inside an X window in Linux! (It runs near native speed. I can run MSWord in the X window running mol, which means that I can run Microsoft in Linux. I wonder what Bill thinks about that?)

But, after a while, you will probably only run Linux. Everything configures well, and the only thing I can't do in Linux is update my iPod.

It's not Debian and you have RPM's instead of .deb packages -- but it's easy and painless. :)

[iGuy]

Please note that my instructions work well for a new world machine. YDL supports old world machines too; and the instructions should work for these too, except for YaBoot. Please read the instructions in the Yellow Dog installer read me files on the CD or web site.