[ale] PPCQ: Trailing edge issues (longish - sorry)

[John Mills]

ALErs -

I want to install Yellow Dog Linux in one of the old, 'Bondi blue' G3-266
iMacs and I am having trouble getting it to boot from the CD for
installtion. I think I may have a recognized, but unusable boot sector
from an aborted installation attempt. On startup, the box gives the
patterned, gray boot screen with a small blinking '?' icon. ('Unbootable
drive' saith the manual.)

I'm installing an old YDL-2.3 because the box has only 96MBy RAM, with a
plan to re-install something more current once I've scarfed some cheap RAM
(like, Fry's has it in stock). The CD is a direct burn of the 'dayton' iso
from a mirror.

HDD is a 'generic' 11 GBy Maxtor ATA that never had Mac software. It did
have a VFAT filesystem and a Linux Reiser filesystem when I started the
project, which may be my problem. I could remove all existing partitions
by putting it into a generic PC and running 'fdisk' if that's the best
answer, but the lazy engineer would rather not pull the drive again. &8-)

I do still have the original 4 GBy drive with its MacOS-9.x untouched. I
have tried the user-manual approaches of starting the box while holding
'c' down, holding 'C' down, or while holding 'Ctrl/Shift/Command/Delete',
to no avail. Neither of these will work with our faithful, working
MacOS-8.6 iMac, either, so maybe I'm not using the right magic.

If the internal 'boot from CD' setting does not require a valid HDD in
place to boot I could use the old HDD to make that setting, then put the
new one back in to install YDL. That means pulling the &^%$!! HDD twice,
naturally.

I also have the iMac CD set from the 8.6 box. Could I do a clean
installation from them on [older] 'Bondi' before moving to YDL? I have the 
same startup problem, though.

Any suggestions from the PPC side of the Linux house?

TIA.
 - Mills