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woolsherpahat
Guru
Joined: 09 Mar 2004
Posts: 347
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 Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2004 9:38 pm Post subject: yaboot menu disappeared... open firmware problem? |
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Hello.
I booted up my iBook G4 today and the yaboot menu was gone! Ahhh! It took me weeks to get ALSA working and now I can't boot Gentoo? I was using OS X last night and the only change I made was I installed KisMac. I can't think of doing anything that would overwrite my bootstrap partition.
So I rebooted the PPC-min livecd, mounted my existing Gentoo filesystems, chrooted in and re-ran ybin -v. No problems no errors. I rebooted and still no yaboot menu.
Does anyone have any idea what's causing this and more importantly how to fix it? |
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DiskBreaker
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Joined: 07 Oct 2003
Posts: 224
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| Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2004 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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Usually stuff like this happens when boot OS 9 and its on the same partition as OS X.
FYI, you don't need a boot cd as the yaboot partition is still there.
Just press and hold Command-Option-O-F while booting to get into open firmware. At the prompt type:
and you should get your yaboot menu. From there boot your linux and rerun ybin -v.
I'm not sure why it didn't work after you did a ybin though. To make sure everything is ok type
| Code: | | nvsetenv boot-device |
(comes with sys-apps/powerpc-utils) and check if it is booting from the right partition. If nothing else works, zap your PRAM on boot by holding Command-Option-P-R and rerun ybin. |
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woolsherpahat
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Joined: 09 Mar 2004
Posts: 347
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| Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2004 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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Ah thank you so much! I just booted into open firmware, ran yaboot, and then did a ybin -v. That solved things.
I think what happened is I took the battery out and it reset open firmware. I vaguly seem to remember doing that.
Regardless it works now! Thank you! |
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killfire
l33t
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
Posts: 618
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| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2004 12:40 am Post subject: |
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as a side nte, for the future.
you dont have to mess with OF if you dont want to,
instead:
when the machine boots, around the time the chime goes (or before) hold the alt/option key,a nd a graphical little thing should show up(does on eveyr new mac ive used...), with various disks, ohne of them having a small tux in th corner.....
count on a mac to give you a gui for EVERYTHING 
killfire |
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ruben
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Joined: 04 Jul 2003
Posts: 462
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| Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 7:52 am Post subject: |
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umm... but that is a *slow* way to boot... i know since i had to do that a couple of times.
10k1, what you said kinda surprised me.. most of the time when i don't get the boot menu anymore, i reset the open firmware on purpose (holding alt-option-p-r while booting up and holding it till you heard the chime for the 3rd time), and normally that solves the problem. I use it for the cases when my ibook comes back from apple repair or after installing mac os x (in those cases it always boots straight into mac os). |
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DiskBreaker
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Joined: 07 Oct 2003
Posts: 224
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| Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 10:33 am Post subject: |
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| ruben wrote: | | umm... but that is a *slow* way to boot... i know since i had to do that a couple of times. |
Very true, that's why I don't like it either. It takes like a minute on my Powerbook until I can choose something from the menu. I have that feeling that the Forth OpenFirmware script running behind it always checks all attached devices, CDs and Network for bootable OSes and then waits for them to time out. Even if I don't have any inserted CDs or network plugged in it takes just as long. I wonder if Apple is ever going to fix that... |
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woolsherpahat
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Joined: 09 Mar 2004
Posts: 347
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| Posted: Wed Jul 28, 2004 6:36 pm Post subject: |
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| This problem seems to keep coming back even after I "fixed" it the first time. I'm going to try reseting the Open Firmware next boot and then re-running ybin -v. |
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_savage
Guru
Joined: 06 Jun 2004
Posts: 308
Location: Redmond, WA
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| Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 4:23 am Post subject: |
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the hinges of my TiBook broke and i dropped it off to get it repaired. took them a while, but today i got it back (yay) but... what the heck, my boot menu is gone. reinstalling it from the cd didn't do anything. so i checked the forum and came across this thread.
at the moment i play with the firmware settings. what puzzles me though is the fact that os-x doesn't see the ext3 partition. how come?
thanks for any hints!
jens
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Jens Troeger
http://savage.light-speed.de/ |
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_savage
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Joined: 06 Jun 2004
Posts: 308
Location: Redmond, WA
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DiskBreaker
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Joined: 07 Oct 2003
Posts: 224
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| Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 9:17 am Post subject: |
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| _savage wrote: | i think there's a typo, or you assume that the yaboot partition is the first on in the system. however, in my case it's /dev/hda10 and then the command is
| Code: | | boot hd:10,\\yaboot |
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I'm sorry, yes. hd:, is a shortcut for "choose the first non-driver partition". The first 8 or so partitions are usually reserved by Apple for driver stuff (unless you run a Linux-only Mac you will need to leave those partitions where they are). I was assuming that most people would have their bootstrap partition as their first (non-driver) partition on the drive, but if not, then you will need to specify the partition number as an argument.
Generally the boot command is built up like this:
| Code: | | boot <device-specifier> <arguments> |
1. <device-specifier>: | Code: | | <OF_path>@<address>:<partition>,<file_path> |
<OF_path>@<address> can usually be abbreviated by the hd alias. "hd" is actually just an alias for the real OF device pathname which will be something like /pci@f2000000/@d/mac-io@7/ata-4@1f000/disk@0. Since this alias is set on all modern Macs it is safe to assume it will point to the right boot device. You can show all your device aliases with the open firmware command: (You are also likely to have other aliases you can use instead like ultra0 for the first IDE hd and ultra1 for the second etc.)
As you can see the hd alias already contains the unit address of the device (@0) so all you have to specify now is the partition as an argument.
So the simplified syntax for device-specifier is:
| Code: | | hd:<partition>,<file_path> |
The file path itself does not allow the use of slashes and that is why you use backslashes instead. You can give a filename to boot a given script (like yaboot) or you can give a file type by using ":<filetype>" to boot a file with a given file type (remember this is an HFS partition and supports the good old MacOS creator/file type mechanism). For example, classic MacOS is usually booted by loading the MacOS ROM file which has a file type of tbxi like this:
2. <arguments>: With this you can directly pass arguments to yaboot.
Regarding using your ext3 partition under OS X you will need these drivers: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx
hth,
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_savage
Guru
Joined: 06 Jun 2004
Posts: 308
Location: Redmond, WA
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| Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 3:20 pm Post subject: |
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well, i have that installed for ages and it was always working fine. now, after the firmware reset, however, OS-X can't seem to be able to mount anything at all? not my ext3 partition, and no .dmg files. the logs say that /sbin/autodiskmount picks it up, but then in brackets "[not mounted]". for .dmg files i get the error 95 "no mountable volume". that's weird.
do you have any idea what's going on?
cheers,
jens
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Jens Troeger
http://savage.light-speed.de/ |
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Gentoo on PPC
