The truth about Apple's fdisk (was: Re: imac install)

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2000 at 12:28:13PM -0600, pohl wrote:
> 
> Ethan wrote:
> >
> > not unfortunately, yaboot is more robust and reliable. just create a
> > 800K bootstrap partition at the front of your disk to hold it after
> > the install, and use my ybin utilites to manage it.  just as easy as
> > lilo. (in mac-fdisk use the C command and create the bootstrap
> > partition as type Apple_Bootstrap)
> 
> Will it work to place this partition after an HFS or HFS+ MacOS
> partition?  I haven't yet found a way to keep the MacOS 9 partitioning
> tool to from destroying my poor little Apple_Bootstrap.  Perhaps I 
> should just consider that tool to be hostile and avoid it?  (Apple's
> disk tool, not yaboot :-)

OK, I got annoyed enough to go test this, and i plan to write a simple
howto for partitioning (you're all in trouble now im annoyed enough to
write docs!)

here is the basics:

Apple's fdisk (Drive Setup) will not *edit* partitions, it only allows
you to blow away the existing map and do it over.  and since it does
not know about Apple_Bootstrap it refuses to create one.  its not
hostile, just braindamaged, but what can you expect ;-)

oh no! Apple's partitioner is braindead! whatever shall we do!

we do just what we do on intel when dealing with the x86 braindamaged
OS and its fdisk, use the braindamaged OS' fdisk for its partitions
and GNU/Linux's fdisk for ours, heres how:

boot to Apple's CD, 
run Apple fdisk, 
hit initialize,
select `custom' 
select `two partitions' from the topmost popup menu
add up the total size for ALL of you linux partitions (including the
bootstrap partition, swap, root, usr, var etc etc) now take that total
and resize the first partition to that.

resize the second partition to the size you want your macos
partition to be.

select the first partition and you can change its type to linux home
or whatever, it really don't matter since were going to delete it in a
minute, its just a placeholder.

go ahead and hit OK, initialize, "yes i really really want to do this"
blah blah blah.... 

you can now install macos on the macos partition if you want, or do it
later it should not matter.

boot into linux run mac-fdisk, 

p to print the partition table, find the placeholder partition we just
created, now delete it.  

now hit C to create the 800K Apple_Bootstrap partition.

hit c for each linux partition you want.

once your done w to write the table.

install linux, configure ybin run mkofboot to setup yaboot.  enjoy!

this is a very rough direction on how to do the partitioning, i plan
to write a nicely formatted (with logged output of a real mac-fdisk
session) 

note that i used apple fdisk 1.8.1 that comes with OS9, i had no
problems with interaction between it and mac-fdisk, i can even create
apple HFS partitions with mac-fdisk and they work fine with macos,
there was just a little minor nuisance of needing to update the
drivers with apple fdisk to get it to automount but nothing
serious. 

cheers,

-- 
Ethan Benson