The first 8GB harddrive limit for booting first iMacs. Help appreciated.

The first 8GB harddrive limit for booting first iMacs. Help appreciated.

[Anthony Renaud]

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My old iMac (1998) G3 seems to have the limit of the first 8 GB for installing any operativesystem if we want it to be bootable.With Mac OS X it seems to be true,we run intoproblems if the installation gets out of this limit.I have a LinuxPPC distribution installed on one partition within my 4GB harddisk,so the8 GB limit does not apply.Now I am installing a new 80GB HardDisk and I want to installFedoraPPC,OpenSusePPC,DebianLennyPPC on it.The problem is : Can Linux surpass this 8GB limit and be installed on partitions out of this8GB limit,and be bootable and run without problems? It seems a hardisk controller limitationof these first iMac models.


      

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Re: The first 8GB harddrive limit for booting first iMacs. Help appreciated.

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Sun, 2008-12-07 at 12:18 -0800, Anthony Renaud wrote:
> The problem is : Can Linux surpass this 8GB limit and be installed on
> partitions out of this
> 
> 8GB limit,and be bootable and run without problems? It seems a hardisk
> controller limitation
> 
> of these first iMac models.
> 
As long as the bootloader and kernels/initrds's is above that limit it's
fine. Make sure to stick the newworld boot partition down there and
create a smallish (100M ?) partition for the actual images (/boot)
instead of leaving them in your main filesystem.

Cheers,
Ben.