I got a question, and I will provide all I know
I have set up my ibook with 3 OS's:
Tiger (client)
Panther (server)
Ubuntu
I had yaboot working at one time, and when i went to select Tiger from 10.3 using startup disk, it disabled yaboot, and I have yet to get it installed. I have been searching all over on how to get firmware to point at yaboot for loading (i don't mind if I enter this everytime I want to boot to linux) and I can't get it directed. I have printed out 50 different papers trying to figure this out and I am pulling my head out
the Disk setup goes as this:
Disk0s0 - i image hd bootsector
Disk0s1- unknown, probably mount point
Disk0s2 - ubuntu swap
disk0s3 - panther
disk0s4 - ubuntu
disk0s5 - Tiger
disk0s6 - supposedly the yaboot sector that ubuntu installed
I need to figure out at least how to get the machine to boot from yaboot.
Please help, as I really don't want to have to blow away my systems HDD so I can get unused space
There are ways to do it, but for future reference, put the small YaBoot partition before any other HFS partitions. The Mac will try to boot from the first HFS partition on the disk, so if the 1MB YaBoot part is first, you don't run into this problem as much. With this method you can jsut Cmd-Opt-P-R to fix it.
To get booting in your situation, try here: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=607951&postcount=3
I found that by going to ubuntuforums.org and typing fix yaboot in the search bar.
You may also be abel to start from the isntall CD, and drop to a shell and try using ybin to get YaBoot reconfigured. See here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/YabootConfigurationForMacintoshPowerPCsDualBoot
EDIT again (I keep thinking of more right after I hit Post...): You can also move/resize HFS partitions around with parted from a shell on the installer CD. You will have to disable Journalling on the OS X HFS partition first, but I've done this sucessfully on an 8500/120 running OS 9 and on my iBook with 10.4.4. See: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89960&highlight=resize+hfs
What happened was MacOS X overwrote the MBR (more or less) on the hard drive. It originally contained yaboot, and now MacOS X has put it's own thing there. What you need to do is fairly simple. Take your Ubuntu install disk, and see if it has a "recovery" mode, which should reset bootloaders like yaboot, and also do your typical fsck'ing of filesystem.
Either way, all you have to do is just use an alternative medium (a CD) of a Linux distro, get it running, and have it install yaboot again, which some livecds or install CDs might have already on their filesystems. Simply reinstall yaboot, and reboot. And you're good to go. No messing around with OpenFirmware.
When you say OS X basically rewrote the "MBR", it changed the OF settings on what to boot. It shouldn't have changed anything on the HD itself. It could be fairly easy to change the boot-device and boot-file entries if he already knew what was supposed to be there, eg. hd:8,yaboot or something similar. That would actually be faster and (maybe) easier than having to boot an install CD, drop to a shell, and reconfigure with ybin.
I did a COMPLETE reinstall, with the Ubuntu as the first partition, then added the tiger, and then panther. all I have to do is hold down option when I want to switch Operating systems (it also accesses Ubuntu, as it shows up as a boot disk). So, I got the problem solved :D.
Thx anyways
--coius--
What format did you use for the linux partition?
I once installed it using ext3 and I needed yaboot, linux didn't show when holding down option.