Re: pdisk and OS9

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2000 at 12:38:13AM -0500, Nelson Abramson wrote:
> Ethan Benson wrote:
> 
> > > 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.
> >
> 
> Hmm...that only happened when I used fdisk in the installer; it worked fine when
> I just skipped fdisk.

MacOS attempts to mount any partition with type Apple_HFS, if its
unreadable as HFS then it will ask to erase it. recent versions of
Drive setup will create linux partitions (Apple_UNIX_SVR2) but i have
found Drive setup to be very buggy.. (what is it about partitioners
that cause them to be almost inherently buggy?)
> 
> Hmm, okay.  I only used yaboot, which works fine off of an hfs partition.

if you manually change OF then it does not matter, but most people
don't want to mess with OF settings, my installer will setup the
bootstrap partition in such a way that OF will boot it with DEFAULT
settings, (provided there is not a macos partition before the
bootstrap partition) but macos will undo my changes which will cause
OF to reject the bootstrap partition.  this is why I say its important
to use the special type, it allows your machine to boot without
tampering with OF. (and to continue to boot even if you reset the nvram
by removing the battery or holding command option p r at boot)

-- 
Ethan Benson