Enable multiple OSX boot option and intellegent labels?

[nello martuscielli]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 1:22 AM, Jim Harris <jimrh at charter.net> wrote:
> Suggestion:
>
> I would like to be able to boot a system with more than one OSX partition,
> in addition to the Linux install.
>
>
>
> In my case I have a system with two Tiger installs, one configured – one
> sandbox, and a Xbuntu install.  Currently I can only boot one of the two OSX
> choices.  If I add more than one “maxosx=” stanza to the yaboot.conf file,
> only the first one on the list is recognized.
>
>
>
> Suggestion:
>
> I would like to add intelligent labels to the choices – something more
> meaningful than “macosx” or such.
>
>

what you need is not really common thus no one asked for this
feature.. and i guess nobody 'll do it in the future.
Expected you already have a working yaboot bootloader installed on
your system you can do it editing by hand the ofboot.b located in your
800k AppleBootstrap partition.
To hack the first stage you simply need to have, as i said, a working
installed yaboot and a kernel capable to handle HFS fs.

e.g.
#  mac-fdisk  -l
/dev/sda
        #                    type name                  length   base
    ( size )  system
/dev/sda1     Apple_partition_map Apple                     63 @ 1
    ( 31.5k)  Partition map
/dev/sda2         Apple_Bootstrap bootstrap               1600 @ 64
    (800.0k)  NewWorld bootblock
/dev/sda3         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap                 1310720 @ 1664
    (640.0M)  Linux swap
/dev/sda4               Apple_HFS B                   41943040 @
1312384   ( 20.0G)  HFS
/dev/sda5         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 /boot                 196608 @
43255424  ( 96.0M)  Linux native
/dev/sda6         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 /                   20971520 @
43452032  ( 10.0G)  Linux native
/dev/sda7         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 /home               25165824 @
64423552  ( 12.0G)  Linux native
/dev/sda8         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 DEVEL               66712112 @
89589376  ( 31.8G)  Linux native

Block size=512, Number of Blocks=156301488
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/hd0/
# df -Th
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6      reiserfs   10G  4.7G  5.4G  47% /
/dev/sda7      reiserfs   12G  8.5G  3.6G  71% /home
/dev/sda8      ext4       32G   25G  5.6G  82% /mnt/DEVEL
/tmp           tmpfs     756M   28K  756M   1% /tmp
shm            tmpfs     756M     0  756M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2      hfs       797K  201K  596K  26% /mnt/hd0
# cat /mnt/hd0/ofboot.b

now you can edit the ofboot.b forth script with your preferred editor
and add your "intelligent labels" (anyway choose just one letter or
one number).

cheers,
Nello
--
My blog: http://linuxpowerpc.blogspot.com
--
Power Mac G4 AGP 450MHz - CRUX PPC (32bit)