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HOWTO-Booting with Yaboot on PowerPC
Chapter 8 - Common Mistakes

The most common mistake made in the usage of yaboot is trying to use it to boot from a mountable partition on a permanent basis. When a PowerPC first starts up, the booting process is started by locating a so-called `blessed' folder. The Mac OS places the blessing so that multiple system folders may exist on a partition, but only one of them will be valid for starting up. If the computer is set up to dual boot Linux and Mac OS, when Mac OS is booted it will unbless any folders which do not contain a valid Mac OS system. Then the next time the machine boots, the partition containing the formerly blessed folder will not be bootable.

The utilities provided with yaboot should always be used to set it up on its own bootstrap partition for regular booting needs. The only time you should place yaboot on a mountable partition is for initial installation of Linux and rescue operations. In those cases you can intervene in the normal bootloading process to request a specific file to be executed, and blessed folders are not an issue since this type of booting is not automatic.

After yaboot has been installed, another common mistake is changing the boot configuration file or updating the yaboot software and then failing to re-run the ybin utility to transfer the changed configuration to the boot partition. Booting functions will not be changed unless the changes are saved to the bootstrap partition. If you change your yaboot.conf often, you might want to add a comment line inside the yaboot.conf file to remind yourself to run ybin after making changes.

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HOWTO-Booting with Yaboot on PowerPC