multibooting ppc with Mac OS 9 & X on an ancient iBook

[Joel Rees]

I recently tried installing Fedora 9 on an iBook that I need to boot  
both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on. I also have some other partitioning  
constraints, so I ended up with 6 partitions before I started the  
Fedora 9 install.

Fedora 9 happily created lots more partitions, but then Mac OS 9 (and  
X, IIRC) refused to boot. Couldn't recognize the format of the disk.  
(Might have helped if I had got a 120 G HD instead of a 160 G HD?)

Also, on a separate iteration, when I tried to force the yaboot  
partition to 1MB, that also apparently made the partition map  
unacceptable to Mac OS 9.

I had to wipe the disks with the Mac OS 9 formatter and start again.  
(Lost a day or so of my time, but no data.) Since I thought I had  
time, I tried an install of just Fedora, but the current partitioning  
software wouldn't create the partition for yaboot any smaller than  
16MB, IIRC, and then it wouldn't install yaboot in anything bigger  
than 1MB.

I am currently successfully multi-booting Mac OS 9 & X (Jaguar) and  
openBSD, but openBSD is not using yaboot. I give the four-finger  
salute on startup and type "boot hd:,ofwboot /bsd" at the open  
firmware prompt. That doesn't really bother me, even though I have to  
remember that the keyboard map is US and doesn't match the Japanese  
keyboard. :-/

openBSD seems to take a little more nursing than I currently have  
time for, and I am primarily interested in getting the Gimp and  
openoffice.org running. Well, probably some of the edutainment stuff,  
as well.

In about two weeks, one of the partitions will be freed, so I should  
have three partitions to give Fedora 9, and I am thinking of trying  
again. But I won't have the day or so necessary to re-build the Mac  
OS 9/X sides of things if the Fedora partitioning software makes the  
map unreadable to Mac OS 9 again. So, I am wondering a couple of things:

One, Is anyone is currently successfully multi-booting Mac OS 9, Mac  
OS X, and Fedora 9 on any system, especially one with a boot HD  
larger than 120G?

Two, would it be possible to boot with openBSD's approach, invoking  
an openfirmware script on the Mac OS 9 boot disk? (I haven't been  
able, yet, to untangle the web of what happened when yaboot became  
usable.)

Joel Rees