We did a clean new installation of MacOS 9.2.2, and subsequent the next step for setting up a dualboot system. We created 3 partitions with MacOS 9 (1 Linux with 71GB, two hfs+ 30GB) - the Linux partition was first on the disk, that's what the d-i manual recommends. Then we used the Debian netinstaller (default mode) to remove the Linux partition, because yaboot needs it's own extra partition. Then we let the installer do the automatic Linux partitioning for beginners, on the now empty space. The Debian installation worked flawlessly and all data are recognized from within debian (even the Mac OS data). However after rebooting the system, yaboot only found the debian installation but didn't know anything about the Mac OS 9 system present on the same hard drive. We manually added the Mac OS installation to yaboot.conf, which kind of worked (yaboot indeed switches to open firmware) but the Mac OS installation appears destroyed (the disk symbol with the blinking question mark). Next step was to reboot from MacOS 9 CD and see what the partitioning tool from MacOS can tell. Nothing. "Laufwerke Konfigurieren" (a German system - can't remember the English name for the partitioning tool) reports a not formatted IDE disc. As said above all MacOS 9 data are accessable from Debian, but it seems to us Debian partitioning tool is "killing" the non afflicted MacOS 9 partitions for MacOS 9. We don't know how to get our MacOS 9 system back. People who try to install Debian not at a seperat hard disk will get serious problems, as they not only have no dualboot system - they even would have no MacOS anymore and a kind of complete dataloss, ... Please let us know if we can help with further information. Also any hints how to get our MacOS installation back working without reinstalling (and thus killing Debian) would be appreciated.
reassign 604134 yaboot-installer thanks Quoting wittau@lnxnt.org (wittau@lnxnt.org): If there's a surviving powerpc porter, hopefully....
I did further investigations if other people had similar problems, and indeed the problem occured several times. For example in 2008 here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2008/05/msg00047.html So it seems to be a common issue. But the solution which worked for José, and Samy back than, do not work in my case/with the latest test image. It's not that the different volumes are not activated/unmounted, it is that the entire hard disk, with all partitions, appears as "not initialized"! Maybe it is the same complex of problems - just a little bit more complicated now, as the Debian partitioning tool advanced? If so, it is maybe not too much work to fix this, and prevent users from beeing unable to have a dualboot system and loosing in unexpected ways the MacOS 9 installation?
tags 604192 patch thanks os-prober wouldn't detect installed MacOS because it missed actual mount point of the tested partition. Variable '$dir' was always empty.
I am not a developer myselve, but discussed the following issue with a developer who asked me to at least inform you about my thought. If I understood the patch, which is presented here, correctly, you search with the following lines:
tags + help affects - yaboot-installer thanks Current os-prober implementation won't detect system folders in various languages in international versions of Mac OS. Assembling a list of all system folder names may be one way to go. Another way could be to do MacOS X probe in a shell script first, and if it yields nothing, run a small binary executable which would check blessing status. UInt32 finderInfo[3] has non-zero value if a blessed MacOS 8/9 folder is located on a HFS+ volume (HFSPlusVolumeHeader struct). UInt32 drFndrInfo[0] has non-zero value if a blessed folder is located on a HFS volume (HFSMasterDirectoryBlock struct). Make sure no Yaboot, Quik, or Grub is located on the blessed volume. HFS wrapping details are described in Apple Technical Note TN1150.