HOWTO-Booting with Yaboot on PowerPC - Yaboot as a Temporary Bootloader

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# HOWTO-Booting with Yaboot on PowerPC
Chapter 10 - Yaboot as a Temporary Bootloader

It's very convenient for certain tasks like installing a new system the first time without a CD, or rescuing an existing system, to boot a ramdisk system such as an installer directly from files placed on an existing partition.

An example is the Debian installer. It is contained in a floppy-image root.bin file which `yaboot` can boot directly. A simple `yaboot.conf` to initialize the ramdisk, yaboot, root.bin, and a kernel image (named linux in this example) are all that is needed. All files are placed at the root level on an existing partition.

The `yaboot.conf` file for this purpose contains just four lines:

             image=linux
             label=install
             initrd=root.bin
             initrd-size=8192

If you create `yaboot.conf` in the MacOS, you must convert it to use Unix newlines (linefeeds only). If you use MacOS newlines (just carriage returns), `yaboot` will be unable to read the file.

You must pick a partition that is formatted with either HFS or HFS+. If you have Mac OS X installed on a UFS partition (You can use the OS X "Disk Utility" app to check this), you will have to find another partition to use. If Mac OS X is installed on UFS, you probably have one or two partitions of the "Apple_Boot" type. They have HFS filesystems on them. Pick one, mount it under MacOS X, and store the files there.

Boot into OpenFirmware, and type at the prompt:

             0 > boot hd:xx,yaboot

replacing xx with the partition number of the partition where the kernel and `yaboot` files were placed, followed by a return. At the boot: prompt, type install followed by a return.

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HOWTO-Booting with Yaboot on PowerPC