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Re: Installation super-woes on PowerBook 3400



On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 12:07:58AM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> 
> I'm really quite baffled by this - I tried to get this to work many a
> time...
> 
> Could you give me the output of starting pdisk as 'pdisk -d /dev/hda'
> and then typing 'xP' ?
> 
> I bet this only works on IDE machines...
> 

ah ! thats it, its the IDE.


i remember years back when apple introduced the first IDE powermacs,
the 5400 (iirc) came with a really bizarre hard disk setup:  it had no
partition table. yes thats right no partition table at all.  just one
big ol HFS filesystem stuck on the raw disk.  no drivers, no partition
table nothing.  

they did not do this for very long because they discovered that the
IDE driver burned into the ROM of these machines was very buggy, and
now they had no way to install a new driver without repartitioning the
disk.  (big brain fart on the part of some apple engineer) i think
they eventually came out with some hack to try and resize the HFS
filesystem and reclaim just enough space to install a partition table
and new driver iirc. 

so yes i bet this trick will only work on IDE powermacs, i think they
were the only ones to have a disk driver burned into the ROM. 

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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