Y e l l o w D o g S o l u t i o n s
How to triple-boot 9/X/YDL on a Beige G3
This HOWTO outlines the steps for installing YDL, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X as a triple-boot
system onto a beige G3. The beige G3 is the earliest model Mac that OS X can be
installed onto. OS X is also rather picky about how it is installed on these machines.
As far as Linux is concerned, the beige G3 is also considered an "Old World"
machine, requiring the BootX init (not yaboot). After much trial and error, gleaning
the lists for info, etc., I finally got a procedure down, and hereby present it.
Note: I was never able to get YDL 2.3 to successfully install on my machine regardless
of partitioning or configuration, but the steps below worked quite well with YDL 2.2.
- Using Apple Disk Tools, initialize the disk into three partitions as follows.
It is essential that the partition destined for Mac OS X be the first logical
partition. The other two are probably arbitrary, but this is the ordering I used:
Partition # For OS Size Format
----------- --------- ------------- -----------
1 Mac OS X MUST be 8 GB HFS+
or less
2 Mac OS 9 * HFS+
3 YDL * Unallocated
* These can be whatever size you choose as long as it will hold your data.
I divided my 40 GB Maxtor into (approximately) 8 GB, 20 GB and 12 GB
respectively.
- Install Mac OS 9 onto the second partition.
- Boot into your new OS 9 partition. Install BootX onto it from the YDL CD.
Afterwards, BootX will automatically reboot your machine.
- At reboot into OS 9, the BootX panel will appear. Click the "Options" button. Select
the ramdisk (text or graphical) you would like to use ("Use specified RAM Disk" ->
"Choose..." button) for the install from the System Folder of the boot drive.
(See guide.shtml#boot for more details).
This will allow you to install YDL.
- Install YDL onto the third partition (See YDL's Guide To Installation). Tip: for the
sake of your mental health, be sure to create your swap partition no larger than 256
MB, otherwise you may encounter the error "activating swap FAILED - invalid argument"
when you finally try to run YDL.
- **(THIS TIP MAY SAVE YOU MUCH MENTAL ANGUISH! [:-)] This will help you avoid the dreaded
"kernel panic - no init found" message.) After installing YDL, your machine
should reboot into your OS 9 partition. When the BootX panel comes up, type in
the path of your Linux root device into the "More kernel arguments" edit field.
This will take the form of "root=/dev/hda10", assuming /hda10 is the partition you set
up as Linux root (your mileage may vary -- substitute the appropriate partition number
for your setup). SAVE this argument to the prefs with the "Save to prefs" button!
- Boot up into the wonderful world of Linux. [;-)] Assuming everything checks out OK,
proceed onwards to...
- Install Mac OS X onto the first partition.
- You should be good to go! Yes, it can be done! You can do it! Godspeed.
** If you're still having trouble figuring out which Linux partition is which (maybe because
you forgot to write them down at install time [;-)] , you can view your partition table
using the freely available Mac OS utility "pdisk". As an example, here is pdisk's output
of my partition table:
Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/ata0.0' (/dev/hda)
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1
2: Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh 54 @ 64
3: Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh 74 @ 118
4: Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh 512 @ 192
5: Apple_Patches Patch Partition 512 @ 704
6: Apple_HFS untitled 16384000 @ 1216 ( 7.8G)
7: Apple_HFS untitled 2 40960000 @ 16385216 ( 19.5G)
8: Apple_Bootstrap untitled 20481 @ 57345216 ( 10.0M)
9: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap 524289 @ 57365697 (256.0M)
10: Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled 22153278 @ 57889986 ( 10.6G)
This HOWTO was written by Bill Preder
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