cellarweasel wrote:This is the exact same problem I'm having. Just wanted to put it out there.
Greetings to all on this thread!
I used to have a G3 tower and am familiar enough with those chips and YDL from that era and earlier to make comments regarding what many are experiencing. The issue sadly wasn't Terra Soft Solutions or even Fixstars, but Apple itself and how they developed the different variants of the G3 containing Old World ROMS and New World ROMS. Long story, short -- Apple wasn't consistent in their design choices and Terra Soft in their versions of YDL 2 - 5 made changes accordingly doing their best to allow YDL users continuing life for their computers. From the earliest incarnation of YDL up to version 3/4 one booted into YDL via a utility called BootX - after Apple added their design change then TSS moved to yaboot as their boot medium from about YDL 5. By YDL 6, support for the G3 was dropped entirely.
I can't provide detailed support for BootX or the G3 as I gutted the G3 for parts years ago. I found informative links discussing BootX here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BootX_(Apple) and here:
http://penguinppc.org/bootloaders/bootx/.
Regarding learning whether your G3 was supported up to what YDL version refer here:
http://www.ydl.net/support/hardware/others.shtml.
Certain people may have to drop down to YDL 3.
Everyone should refer to the YDL installation notes available here:
http://www.ydl.net/support/installation/archives/. Please note the language of the document especially as
"were officially supported" does not mean is.
Avoiding for the moment the G3 design issue, a common problem which creates installation grief is that quite a few people rush ahead to install YDL and avoid/ignore the preparation process which briefly means using Apple's partition program from it's install CD/DVD to prepare partition for both the Mac OS and the foundation which Anaconda (YDL's installer) will use later. Procedural details exist in the installation notes I provided above. As these partitions are developed (for the Mac OS and YDL) at the same time this means all documents on the Mac side have to be saved, and all Mac applications in use will have to be reinstalled. The process of reinstalling the Mac OS and documents can be postponed until after one has completed the entire YDL installation process. The interesting point, if these procedures are executed in the correct sequence, is that after Apple's partition program has prepared the hard drive as described (for a YDL system which will share the same drive with the Mac OS) then Anaconda can run on that same drive for successive versions of YDL. Stated differently, this means that if one had to one should be able to install YDL 3, 4 or 5 on the same G3 without needing to modify anything on the Mac OS side at all; also Anaconda wouldn't change or destroy anything on the Mac OS side because during the installation process of YDL one has the option to tell Anaconda to operate only on Linux partitions (which were prepared previously by Apple's partition application - a step which only needs to be done once).
A reference determining whether you have an Old World or New World ROM is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh.