A couple of questions: 2 - HDD upgrade/dual boot with Ubuntu Linux

[nplima]

Hi All,

I got a Powermac G4 on Ebay which included a 10GB hard drive. I had a 80GB drive to spare and decided to add it so I could dual boot between OS X and Ubuntu Linux 5.10.

The partition list Ubuntu installer found on the 10GB drive is as follows:
HDA1 32KB Apple
HDA2 32KB macintosh
HDA3 32KB macintosh
HDA4 262KB Patch Partition
HDA5 10GB hfs+ MacOS
and some 147KB of free unallocated space in the end.


on the other IDE channel there was my 80GB drive, which should be faster. I decided to replicate this structure on the 80GB 7200rpm drive, leaving more room for the OS X partition than before (40GB). I left out HDA2 and HDA3 as they seemed redundant, but it's a brand new install, so if someone tells me it's relevant, I don't mind starting over.
I also added some 20GB of FAT32 partition so both OS could read and write to, then some 20GB for Linux (includes "/", "/home" and "/swap").

Now, it would make some sense to replace the 6 year old 10GB drive, ideally keeping everything working (if you find my other post in the forum, you'll know that I don't have a OS X install CD yet). Then I realised that Ubuntu Linux does not actually read hfs+ partitions, so I'd say that using dd will not work, will it?

The 2nd question (which I will address to linux forum people) is a bit embarassing, as I should have thought about it beforehand. Yaboot and all of the linux instalation "knows" where things are with the 10GB Maxtor as master and the 80GB as slave. Now if I remove the 10GB drive, will any of this work?

Thanks for any help.


Nuno Lima

 

[nplima]

update-. hope I'm not missing anything...

update:

the dd utility does actually read the volumes "raw", so I'm now copying everything to the partitions on the new harddrive.

In order to have all this work, I resized the partitions so I'm actually cloning the 10GB drive to the 80GB drive. Some 40GB are left free between the "old" Mac OS partition and the Linux partitions, so that ASAP OSX will be installed properly taking advantage of the extra space.

Before finishing this procedure, the /etc/fstab on both operating systems has to be corrected to mount the volumes from their new hardware locations.

NL

 

[nplima]

update 2

Update II:

of course the boot loader got all confused when I removed the 10GB drive, and everything got stuck.
I now booted up from the Ubuntu C
D which is being installed, and fixing the fstab, yaboot.conf, etc.

The difference between now and the starting point is that all data from the hfs+ partition(s) was copied verbatim to the new hard drive. Let's see if yaboot will manage to get the OS X partition to start up as it did on the other hard drive (I doubt it).

obviously this whole thing was a flop, there must be 10 better ways to get to the same result.

NL