Reformatting LinuxPPC1999 partitions for MacOSX

gronos

Registered
I installed LinuxPPC1999 on my desktop beige G3/233 on unix partitions. Is there a simple way of changing the partitions so that I can install OSX onto it without reformating the entire disk? Can I use the scratch partition as a scratch partition in OSX (does it even neen one?). Thanks for any info you can send.

Richard M. Gronostajski
Assoc. Staff
Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic Foundation
Dept. of Cancer Biology, NB40, 9500 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, OH. 44195
Assoc. Prof., Case Western Reserve Univ., Dept. of Biochemistry

Lab Webpage http://elegans.swmed.edu/Worm_labs/Gronostajski/
CCF homepage http://www.lerner.ccf.org/pi/gronosta.html
CWRU homepage http://www.cwru.edu/med/biochemistry/faculty/gronostajski.html
 
Yes there is!
Boot off the Linux PPC CD and go into the partition utility.
There you will see all your paritions. All you have to do then is find your linuxPPC partition and change its type from a unix partition to an HFS partition. Exit the program, and reboot. Once you reboot and the desktop appears you will have a adialog box saying that disk is not formated. (this is your former linux partition), just click initialize (in HFS+ of course) and there you have it.

(This is the way I changed my linux PPC 2000 partiotion in order to get OS X on it :) )


Admiral
 
Thanks for the information. Can I combine the scratch partition with the main partition at the same time? I'd prefer having one or a few large partions in HFS+ to having all 8 partitions that I had to make when installing LinuxPPC. I'm concerned that if I combine the ufs partitions that I will affect the HFS+ partitions that I have on the system. I only have one big hard drive.

Richard M. Gronostajski
Assoc. Staff
Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic Foundation
Dept. of Cancer Biology, NB40, 9500 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, OH. 44195
Assoc. Prof., Case Western Reserve Univ., Dept. of Biochemistry

Lab Webpage http://elegans.swmed.edu/Worm_labs/Gronostajski/
CCF homepage http://www.lerner.ccf.org/pi/gronosta.html
CWRU homepage http://www.cwru.edu/med/biochemistry/faculty/gronostajski.html
 
Sorry :-(
You cannot combine your scratch with your formet linuxPPC partition (at least I couldnt do it without reformating my whole hard drive). I had to leave my scratch (100Mb) as is. I just use it for text storage now.


Admiral
 
Tried what was suggested, but LinuxPPC1999 doesn't allow booting off the CD the way LinuxPPC200 does! So I tried using pdisk to check the partitions. This works, but there doesn't seem to be a way of just changing the partition type in pdisk, it seems that you have to delete a partition and them create a new one. I'm a little worried about doing that on the system disk. Also, pdisk seems to only create unix partitions unless there's more documentation than I can find! Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Richard M. Gronostajski
Assoc. Staff
Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic Foundation
Dept. of Cancer Biology, NB40, 9500 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, OH. 44195
Assoc. Prof., Case Western Reserve Univ., Dept. of Biochemistry

Lab Webpage http://elegans.swmed.edu/Worm_labs/Gronostajski/
CCF homepage http://www.lerner.ccf.org/pi/gronosta.html
CWRU homepage http://www.cwru.edu/med/biochemistry/faculty/gronostajski.html
 
OK, I looked though my linux and here is what I did
In the linux installer (in the X11 environment) there is a button called "partition drives".
click on that. Then you will see a list of all your partitions. I assume your linux partition will be around 1.3Gb, and that your regular parition (MacOS partition) is the bigger one., and then you have your smallest partition (swap about 100Mb), and then there are other junk there with no size. If all else fails use size to guide you lol.

In that partition utility there is a button called "convert type" Select your linux partition (which is of type LinuxPPC I think ). If you only have 3 partitions as you claim one will be of tye Apple HFS> THIS IS YOUR MAC PARTITION...DO NOT SCREW WITH IT!!!!!

NOw select youe <b> linuxPPC </b> partition and click the "convert type" button as many times as needed until it's type is Apple HFS. Then you can just quit the partition utility, and then reboot. (well in my case I reboot).

once the MacOS comes up it wont recognize your former LinuxPCC partition (because it will still have all that linux FileSystem stuff on it) so just click OK to initialize, and initialize it as HFS+.

Thats all ;)


I hope this helps

Admiral
PS: why doesnt LinuxPPC 1999 boot ?!
 
It might be a good thing to keep your old swap partition around. It's a good idea to have /var/log on a separate partition. There is a type of attack where people flood a computer with stuff that gets written to logfiles, and then the logfiles get so big that the whole drive is full.

Now, it may not be all that easy to specify what gets mounted where at boot time. Apparently you can't do that in PB at all. Remains to be seen how it works later...
 
Managed to use pdisk to change the ufs partition to an Apple_HFS partition and then reboot. Finally got the courage to reinitialize the new partition (despite the fear that it would wipe my startup disk partition) and it worked fine. Thanks for the advice Admiral. Also, as suggested I decided to keep the swap partition just in case I need it later. Thanks all for the advise.

rich G.
 
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