Chris said:-
OK, so you'll be able to boot the installer if you add a couple more files to your MacOS volume, namely root.bin and linux.bin from the CD. Then
.do the "boot hd:7,yaboot" and that will get you back in the installer.
Somehow, I guess your bootstrap partition doesn't get set up with the yaboot file, yaboot.conf, and ofboot.b. You could verify this in the installer by switching to console 2 (Alt-F2), and mount -t hfs /dev/hda2 /mnt ls /mnt to see what's there. If mount gives you an error, then probably the partition wasn't even initialized.
With the aid of the Complete Idiots Guide to Unix by Bill Wagner I managed to try
ls -A -l /mnt and got the following for the contents of /dev/hda2 (my 800K bootstrap) 8 .finderinfo 8 .resource 300 .rootinfo 2601 ofboot.b 150020 yaboot 470 yaboot.conf (the sizes are in bytes not 512 byte chunks or strange Unix disc units)
umount /mnt Switch back to the menu (Alt-F1), and run Make Hard Disk Bootable. then switch back to console 2 and repeat the mount, see if stuff is there now. If it's not, that is totally strange. Maybe you can get more information by running mkofboot manually: cp /target/etc/yaboot.conf /etc/yaboot.conf mkofboot -v
I have not dared to try mkofboot yet but Make System Bootable was the option available - not Make Hard Disk Bootable. And then I was made to mount the root and re-initialize the swap partition.
From the above it looks as though everything that should be on the 800K bootstrap is there, it just won't work!
FYI. It took three attempts to get Alt-F2 to work, press too early and the install screen goes red and the keyboard locks up!
Next time the gurus do an install, do me a favour, pretend you are a newbie and follow the documentation and see what happens!
DT - next attempt is Friday