Mac partitioning probs

[Matthew Kirkwood <matthew@hairy.beasts.org>]

Hi,

Thanks to help from this list, I now have my Mac booting
and starting the installer (via BootX).

My next problem is that the kernel doesn't seem interested
in recognising the partition table that I create on the
disk.

I followed Ethan Benson's instructions and partitioned the
4Gb disk that I chucked in there, but the kernel appears
not to be parsing it.

dmesg says:

SCSI device sda: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 8888924 [4340 MB] [4.3GB]
SCSI device sdb: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 1431760 [699 MB] [0.7GB]
..
Partition check:
 sda: sda1
 sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 sdb4 sdb5 sdb6


/proc/partitions confirms this view.  Interesting lines:

major minor  #blocks  name

   8     0    4444462 sda
   8     1    4441941 sda1
[sdb snipped]

mac-fdisk will happily display what's on sdb (the MacOS disk)
and on sda (where Debian will live).

I've tried rebooting and restarting the installer in case the
kernel thought that something was busy, but it's just the same
next time.

Anyone willing to offer ideas?

Thanks,

Matthew.