How do I remove yaboot?

ElDiabloConCaca

ElDiabloConCaca

U.S.D.A. Prime
Ok, I've had YellowDog Linux installed on my machine for a few months now and am ready to remove it. I use yaboot, which apparently resides in the firmware (would that be open-firmware? I dunno...).

My question is this: how do I remove yaboot from my firmware? I can't find any how-tos ANYwhere. Nothing on YellowDog's site. Help please!
 
You don't want to remove yaboot. It's part of the firmware on all New World Macs.

Or am I mistaken...?
 
Hmmm... I was under the impression that yaboot was installed into the firmware by various Linux distributions to allow booting of a Linux OS. Yaboot, when installed, presents an open-firmware menu something like this:

L Linux
X Mac OS X
C CD-ROM
boot?

...and then you hit one of the keys (L, X or C) to boot whatever you wanted. I want it gone. I want my firmware back to normal, dangit! ;)
 
This might sound stupid, but why don't you go on apple's support/download site and look for the most updated version and download that, it might put things back in place :(

Or look on YDL.com and look under FAQ, or e-mail them.

WOW, I would have never imagined I would be helping you, although my advice is probably not correct, maybe it will put you in the right direction :D
 
Well, there is no updated version of open-firmware or yaboot, and downloading and installing a newer version of yaboot defeats the purpose of trying to remove yaboot... :(

YDL FAQ has no info on removing yaboot. E-mail support is only available to those "premium" members, who actually paid for the product and got the boxed set. :(

I've managed to remove the prompt by resetting the nvram and pram, but my system boot funky now -- a lot of the times it can't find the startup disk, other times it simply hangs.

Frustrating. A notice that a yaboot installation is permanent would have been nice.
 
I finally did, and it actually killed my hard drive. My Mac OS X hard drive is no longer recognized -- no partitions, no format, no nothing -- the device doesn't even show up in Disk Utility under Mac OS X or pdisk under Linux.

I removed the offending hard drive and reinstalled Mac OS X 10.3 on a smaller 10GB drive. It was time to replace that aging hard drive anyway. I lost about 900 pictures, though -- word to the wise: BACKUP!
 
Have you tried using the following commands in OpenFirmware?
> reset-nvram
> reset-all

This might do it for you....
 
Yep, I tried 'em all. Zapping PRAM, open-firmware reset-nvram/all, removing PRAM battery overnight, pressing the CUDA switch, etc.

I think what happened is that one of my partitions on my drives got screwed -- the device wouldn't even show up in System Profiler nor Disk Utility. I removed the drive, put the remaining drives on my ATA/100 PCI card bus, and all is well.

Now I'm just looking for a replacement drive. It was an old 20GB 5400RPM drive, and I wanted something bigger and faster anyway. harddrive.com has a Western Digital SE 120GB w/8MB cache drive for $98. I don't think that's a bad deal at all... ;)
 
if im not mistaken, you need to update your system using the os x cd. so that the os x will override the yaboot. cause yaboot is used to replace the os boot system so that it can load the linux.

once the os x has replace the boot system, you won't be able to load your linux and the os will not recognise the partition where u had installed your linux.

hopes this will help.
 
Yeah, I finally figured it out -- it's actually as simple as booting into OS X and using the Startup Disk control panel to select the OS X drive as the boot drive. That alone will overwrite the firmware and get rid of yaboot.

Thanks all for the info!
 
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