Hello all,
Well I've tried this a few times to no avail. I'm trying to do a dual boot from a USB drive on my Mac mini G4 with 256mb ram (early 2005). I have a 160gb usb drive that I had in two partitions one is back up of my hard drive and the other was free space for the mintppc 9 install. I downloaded the mini.iso, burned it to a cd all went well until I got to the yaboot installation. It says it couldn't install as there was no boot partition. I used guided partitioning, largest free space. So I continued without installing yaboot. I've looked but have been unable to find a way to install yaboot manually. I managed to download yaboot-1.3.17.tar.gz It's now on the OS 10.3.9 desktop but I don't know how to proceed.
I'm totally new to linux but would like to breath new life into my mini, web browsing capability mostly. I have lots of useful software on the internal hard drive hence my reluctance to wipe it.
Also now I can't see half of my external hard drive in disk utility.
Any help much appreciated, even if it's give up now.
Also I appear to be able to boot Mac OSX from the external drive.

You have to boot into a Linux live environment and try to find out the open firmware path to the drive. There is a manual about it I think. Ah yeas, I found it and I made it a sticky:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=877

General info on yaboot:
http://mac.linux.be/content/yaboot

Thanks for getting back to me. I've tried the ioreg command in the terminal and it just returned me an example of the syntax and a list of letters and what they're for. Also in disk utility I was able to find the two linux partitions but not the boot strap. It doesn't give the device tree and just usb as the connection bus. I got these from the terminal with diskutil list as disk 1 partition 4 bootstrap, partition 5 unix 70gb and 6 unix.
The nvram worked in the terminal and when I added a third backslash I got two outputted as shown.
I'm afraid you're losing me at the telnet stuff.
Thanks again.

I don't use MintPPC. I use *ubuntu. The following links will help you:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#I.27 ... an_I_do.3F

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#How_ ... B_drive.3F
(scroll down to the "Installing to USB" section)

Thanks for the advice and I had a look at the links. I tried to install just the debian squeeze onto the usb external hardrive but when I got to the stage of installing Yaboot it failed. Just as before. Saying to look at /var/log/syslog in virtual console 4. I'm guessing that the USB hard drive is not bootable from on my mac mini.
What do you think?

Debian, MintPPC (which is just Debian), and *Ubuntu suffer from the same bug - the installer can't workout the openfirmware path to USB drives. So when the installer is finished you don't have your yaboot bootloader installed. This is easily solved, but it is probably a bit overwhelming for somebody new to linux.

The first thing to do is boot your installed system. You need to get to a yaboot prompt and the easiest way to do that is using your CD. At the yaboot prompt on your CD enter something like:

conf device=usb0/@1 partition=3 file=/etc/yaboot.conf

where usb0 is the device name (my ports are either usb0 or usb1) and partition=3 is the root partition number where you installed linux (for you is that partition=5 ?).

This should load the configuration file from the USB device. Press TAB to confirm everything is okay. You should have options 'Linux' and 'old' if it is the same as ubuntu. If it does that press Enter and linux will boot off the USB device.

When you've booted up you can change your yaboot.conf file as per the links I gave so you don't have to use the CD to boot.

Hi Ojordan,
Thanks again but I'm a poor student. I've tried various usb numbers etc but each time I get Unable to open invalid device. So I guess I don't have the correct device name. In the devalias in OF I get about 7 or 8 different usb no. some with letters. That's a lot of variations to manually go through.
My thinking now is to borrow a fire wire hardrive, and osx 10.3.9 disc and partition my internal harddrive and clone over the old drive when it's done. This might have two effects, I could get Mintppc working easier and I'd have a fresh install of macosx.
I've spent a lot of time at this already and it is a little frustrating with the little knowledge I have. Again thanks for you help and I'm open to suggestions.
Roebow

Are you sure you are typing it correctly? I've just tried the instructions and couldn't get it to work. It took me 10 minutes to realise I had been missing a / on every command I was typing. Maybe you have to put the 'disk' in:

conf device=usb1/disk@1 partition=3 file=/etc/yaboot.conf

For me usb1 is an alias to /pci@f2000000/usb@1b . So you could use that:

conf device=/pci@f2000000/usb@1b/disk@1 partition=3 file=/etc/yaboot.conf

You can work out what the device is called through commands in openfirmware. There are links in the links I gave to do this.

I'm pretty sure you should have a yaboot.conf file setup somewhere on your system, but I've never installed to USB so I can't be 100% and don't want to waste your time. From the error you are saying though it sounds like the device part is the bit that is wrong. What does typing "help" at the yaboot prompt say?

The other way to do it is edit a yaboot.conf through a live linux CD. Or I'm sure you can set one up from Mac OS X, but that is likely to be just as complicated.

Granted I have misspelled a few things but I have corrected them as I've tried things more than once. I gave it one more try this morning and I just cannot identify the device path of the usb external drive. Always the same reply invalid device unable to open.
I now need to find a way to repartition my external hard drive so I can use it with Mac os x 10.3.9 again. Currently it's unmountable as it's ext3.
Anyway thanks for both your help, I think I'll repartition my internal hard drive and install linux there. More research to do on how to do that without the mac install discs.
All the best.

I thought I would update this thread. I never got the usb drive to work. Typically after all the effort I remembered an old Ipod that wasn't being used so I set it up as a firwire hard drive. Great I thought. Half way through the install, I get a black screen. Ah yes I'd seen this mentioned. So reboot the computer into MacOS still black screen. Yep the screen was buggered. So I pulled out an old screen but it wouldn't work with the higher res that the mac was set to so I had to boot up in safe mode, hold shift (if I recall correctly) and I was able to get screen working.
After that the new screen wouldn't work with the auto url=mintppc command so I installed using the instructions for Mintpp9 and it seems to be working fine. I still have to set up my email etc but I'm very pleased.
So thanks to all who have helped.