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.
That's assuming that yaboot is installed on the first blessed partition on hda, yes? I mean, if I had OS X on hda and yaboot's bootstrap partition on hdb, it seems to me unlikely that command-opt-P-R would set OpenFirmware to boot from hdb. Also, would this "re-bless" an unblessed partition? I thought that would require writing at least a few flag bits to the partition itself. Maybe not. Are the "blessed" vs "unblessed" flags for partitions stored in OpenFirmware or on disk?
-Dan
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