Mike and any others interested in what works with this problem--
Here is what I did that worked:
Remember I have a smaller drive that had MacOSX installed on it with a HighATA patch that enabled MacOS 10.4 to read larger drives past the 137gb barrier -- it worked fine with only MacOSX but played hell with Linux installers.
small drive: 20gb large drive: 300gb
Using the MacOS 10.4 disk utilities from the smaller drive I was able to make a partition on the large drive that was the same size as the small drive boot partition -- and then use Apple Disk Utility to do a backup and restore of the small drive to that partition on the large drive that was still bootable in the end and still had the HighATA patch...
Once I verified that MacOS would boot from the restored image on the large drive -- then and only then I could have other larger data partitions on the large drive and I could format the smaller drive for linux and the linux install actually worked to the smaller drive.
So now I have the small 20gb WD drive booting linux with yaboot and the large drive boots MacOSX Tiger. Had tried this once before without luck but 10.4.8 upgrade in MacOSX did something to Disk Utilities and it worked. When I first asked the question I had been trying to use the large drive for linux and keep the smaller drive as MacOSX -- that did not and does not work.
The Problem with my approach is I have to keep an 8.5gb first MacOSX partition on the large drive to boot from or reinstall MacOSX to...and patch that with the HighATA software patch so that it will read the other larger partitions on that drive properly...Otherwise it reads a 300gb drive as if it were just a 137gb drive.
If I ran the entire G3 as just a linux box then as of FC5 there are openfirmware patches in the kernel that will handle large drives properly.
Anyway sorry for the long reply but figured the list might need this info for someone else later on...Thanks Mike for your interest and reply I appreciate that you responded even so long after I made the initial plea for help.
James Rooker --- Mike Hammill mike@kth.se wrote:
Dear James,
I have four B&W G3 running, two on Gentoo, one on FC6, and one on Ubuntu. I took a quick check around and see that they are all running with small (< 80 GB) disks. Some B&W Macs had bad IDE controllers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_white_Power_Macintosh_G3
and there are some sites out there that help you tell if your machine falls into this category:
http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g3c.shtml
(look for "402" on the controller). I remember trying to install SuSE on a B&W with a large new hard drive and it just about drove me insane. Everything _seemed_ to be going fine, then suddenly just hung up (and various, unpredictable places). I think I always got "time out" errors though.
My suggestion would be to get the ATA controller your leaning toward, but without funds it might be tempting to seek out some old, smaller hard drive for a Linux/Mac boot and use an external Firewire drive for storing larger files/apps.
Just my 2 cents. /Mike
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