Re: pdisk and OS9

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 11:23:17AM -0500, Nelson Abramson wrote:
> telkis@americanisp.com wrote:
> 
> > I have an iBook (Family #M2453) running OS9 with MAC OS ROM 3.1.1.
> > The hard drive reports as a Toshiba MK3211MAT and the driver version is
> > reported as 3.2.4 in OS9. The pdisk version appears to be 0.7.
> 
> Mac pdisk is broken in MacOS9.  I haven't heard of it failing to report on the
> existance of a drive, but if you write a partition table with it, it will not
> work with linux.  It could, though, perhaps, account for your problem.
> 
> I'm not sure how you would go about getting a good partition table.  I have had
> problems w/ fdisk reading partition tables created by apple drive setup (and
> even pdisk).  It forces me to destroy the existing partition table and create a
> new one...  I might try creating linux partitions or blank hfs partitions w/
> drive setup and just mounting them in the installer (and obviously formating
> them)

not a good idea, the type will then be Apple_HFS and macos will
`helpfully' want to erase them at every bootup when it sees there is
no real hfs filesystem on them.

> 
> In order to use yaboot, you need a small hfs partition (apple drive setup will
> make one nicely) with the yaboot executable and kernel on it.

Drive setup will not allow you to create it with the special type
(Apple_Bootstrap) which is required if you wnat it to remian bootable
without screwing with OF, if Macos is allows to mount it, it will
procede to make it unbootable. (reminds me of win95 overwriting
lilo...)

best reccomendation is to use mac-fdisk under linux.. this is however
tricky if you don't have an external disk or something to boot with
while you repartition the internal..  

the way i did it was creating a hfs partition on the internal disk put
yaboot and the kernel + ramdisk on it, then used OF to boot it and
then linux, used mac-fdisk to blow away the partition table and make a
new one and installed base + hfsutils from NFS, that way i could setup
the bootstrap partition and booting then worked. if you don't have NFS
you need an external disk or linux bootable CD (which none exist yet
AFAIK)

-- 
Ethan Benson