According to Derrik Pates, on Wed, 21 Jul 2004 15:42:22 -0400, >Michael Schmitz wrote: >> And the yaboot man pages explicitly say not to do that, ever ... >Please> don't advertise your hack for the general public (few people >know what> 'blessing' the yaboot image means, or what the funky >hd:,\tbxi does, for> instance). > >I think you mean "hd:,\\:tbxi", but yes, definitely agreed, since MacOS > very much likes to unbless partitions that don't belong to it - having > a >rash of "I can't boot Linux on my Power Mac! I did [blah foo bar], make > it work!" is what made Ethan Benson say "don't install yaboot on a > MacOS >partition, OR ELSE" and other such stern warnings. >
I completely agree with you that this hack should not be used in general, especially while you can boot any linux kernel and then call ybin to do the things properly. Nevertheless, when yaboot is crashed I don't see the risk in mounting the partition. Either it can bring you to a point where you can correct your yaboot.conf file and save the situation. Either it will unbless your partition and yaboot won't launch your kernel, but it could not do it anyway. So you will have to find a rescue disk, boot it and run ybin which will rebless the partition... AFAIK, this is a last resort hack which must only be used in very special situation. Nevertheless, knowing it in these situations is useful. So instead of telling me not to talk about this taboo, I think it would be more useful to explicit the very small set of situations where it can be used. It may also depends on the machine (an ibook2.2 here). -- Cedric "[Of course] I'm French! Why do think I have this outrageous accent, you silly king-a?!" Monty Python and the Holy Grail
