When installing YDL 2.1 on a PowerPC 7500/100 under OS 7.5.3 the installation fails at the disk partitioning step because the partition editor "parted" objects to the format of the partition information which Drive Setup (Version B1-1.0.4) writes to disk.
Introduction:
When installing YDL 2.1 the MacOS Drive Setup utility is used to initially partition the drive. When the installer is run the installation cannot get past the YDL drive partitioning step because of an error returned from the partitioning tool "parted".
Specifically the error message given is:
There was a problem opeing /dev/sda Error: The partition's data region doesn't occupy the entire partitionThis implies that the partition information written by Drive Setup is unacceptable to "parted" and hence a method is required to modify the information such that the installation can continue.
This HOWTO presents one such method.
Details:
1) Bootup from MacOS install cd and run DriveSetup to initialize the target disk.
2) Create 2 HFS partitions sized as required (e.g. 100M partition at the end of the drive for MacOS and the other partition reserving the remainder of the space for YDL).
3) Initialize the drive.
4) Install MacOS as usual - making sure to install to the right partition (likely to be drive "untitled 2") and reboot into the newly installed MacOS.
5) Follow the YDL install instructions to install "BootX" (after having installed your favourite expander application to handle the .hqx file - OS 7.5.3 doesn't include any such utility)
6) Reboot, following the YDL instructions to boot into the text version of the installer by selection of the appropriate ram-disk image (it is important to use the text version).
7) Follow the installation instructions to the point of drive partitioning, select the drive and click "Edit".
At this point the error message detailed in the introduction will be shown - hit "OK", it will probably be shown again - hit "OK" again and now drops back to the drive selection screen.
8) Switch to another console - use Command+Option+F2 to switch to console 2 (this is the key combination that worked with my system - there may be other such combinations). It is convenient to do this at this point rather than earlier because /dev/sda is only visible once this point in the installtoin is reached.
9) At the prompt enter:
parted /dev/sdaThen at the parted prompt enter the command:
iand the partition map will be printed.
(to indicate Ignore)
10) The next step is to find and remove the HFS partition which was used to reserve space for the YDL install.
From the map details identify the number of this partition - look for the name (it should be "untitled") and/or the correctly sized partition based on the start and end values.
11) Enter the command:
rm #Again you will get the error message and again choose to i(gnore).
(where # is the partition number determined above for the HFS partition to remove)
The partition will be removed by "parted" and this will cause it to rewrite the partition map - so now the pertition map will be present in a format that "parted" will be happy with. As a check, try printing the partition map - this time there should be no error message.
12) Quit from parted and switch back to the install console with COMMAND+OPTION+F1 (or whatever your key combination is).
(An option at this point would be to reboot and select the X11 based installer image instead of continuing with the text version.)
13) Now back at the disk partition screen again, select the disk and hit "Edit" - this time you will move into the partition editing screen where you can add the partitions required for YDL as described in the installation instructions and then continue through the remainder of the installation.
Closing:
This solution may well work for other versions of Drive Setup which do not write partition information in a format acceptable to "parted". The solution was tested on a PowerPC 7500/100 but will likely work on other models also.
This HOWTO was written by Jeremy Trask
