Dammit, only a month after posting and no one can post any comment anymore in my last journal entry. How am I supposed to get the feedback I'd like to get if this feedback can only come within a month after posting ?

And one would wonder why /. Journals aren't that useful... time to forward the question to my AUG, way fewer geeks there than here on /. , but at least they're allowed to answer my question even years after I asked it.

Damn half-assed "solutions"...

So...I want to run Linux on a PowerMac 7300 (PPC 200 MHz, 96 MB RAM, 2 GB SCSI HDD, YelllowDog 3 should be near perfect on this). As it's an "OldWorld" Mac, I have to use BootX, which means that I have to install a minimal MacOS

A friend of mine gave me a spare hard drive that's been collecting dust on a shelf for several years, a 200 MB IBM WDS-3200 with a 50-pin SCSI interface.

My plan was to install MacOS 8 with BootX 1.2.2 on the 200 MB HDD, and YellowDog Linux 3 on the 2 GB one. To be optimal, the Linux drive should be first on the internal SCSI chain, the MacOS one being second (and last).

I know that SCSI devices are meant to be chained, and that the last link in a SCSI chain should be "terminated". In an internal chain that usually means finding the "terminator" switch on the drive itself.

Problem is: I don't have any tech doc about this drive, and there's not one "term" switch but three! They are along the SCSI interface, labeled "T-RES" and each one has three positions.

I could try all nine combinations, but as I said above we're talking about an "OldWorld" Mac, so I must boot into MacOS before having the chance to boot into the YDL installer (it's a LiveCD), but as I change a setting on the drive the Mac can't find anymore the boot drive. I must first boot using a MacOS install CD, use Drive Setup to mount the 200 MB drive (with MacOS 8 installed on it), choose that drive as a boot device, reboot, wait for MacOS 8 to load to get the BootX dialog, choose "Linux", reboot, wait for Linux to load, wait for the YDL installer to load, and only then launch the partitionning tool only to get a two-minutes hang followed by the console message "Kernel panic: Double DMA start!". One can't stress how much irritating this process can get.

Does anyone have some doc about this drive ? It would come VERY handy.

Also, there are three jumper positions on the front side of the drive, the last three being the SCSI ID setup (currently with a jumper set to have SCSI ID 3) but the first three remain a mystery as they're labeled "X", "X" and "M". Any idea ?