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Re: Mac disk partitioning (was: Floppy-less booting)



On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 07:58:59PM -0700, Tovar wrote:
>     > Drive Setup is a very weak program, that AFAIK allows only integral numbers
>     > of M to be typed in.
> 
>     thats why you should NOT use drive setup to create linux partitions.
>     please read and follow:
> 
>     http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/doc/mac-fdisk-basics.txt
> 
>     you need to create only TWO partitions with drive setup, the first is
>     a placeholder for ALL your linux partitions, the second is for macos.
> 
> IMO, you don't need any Mac utilities to partition a disk exclusively for
> LINUX.  What you need "Drive Setup" or "Hard Disk Toolkit" for is to install

correct, i thought i had made this clear.  when you are trashing the
legacy MacOS* you should use mac-fdisk's `i' command to purge the
entire partition table removing all that cruft MacOS leaves.  or if
using parted: mklabel mac.  

> a MacOS compatable disk driver and associated partitions which OpenFirmware
> uses to boot MacOS.  So you only need to run one of these programs once, IF

um no.  OpenFirmware does not use driver partitions, never has never
will.  these are for MacOS8/9 only.  even OSX does not use these
driver partitions. (or at least it doesn't need them). 

> Be aware, though, that you won't be able to access any HFS partitions on
> that disk from MacOS, even if you boot MacOS from floppy or a ZIP drive.
> You need those funny extra partitions that Drive Setup or equivalent
> create to do that.

this is correct, but if your dedicating the disk to linux why would
you have HFS partitions?  (Apple_Bootstrap does not count in this
context).  

> The longstanding problem with HFS is that it's very inefficient for large
> disks because they didn't allocate enough bits for disk addresses back in
> the 128K Mac days.  If you must share a drive between MacOS and LINUX, i
> suggest creating small MacOS partitions (<< 1GB) if you have lots of small
> files.  The only problem with that is that it makes for a busy /etc/fstab
> file and a more cluttered MacOS desktop.

or if using OSX install it onto UFS so you can access the files
(readonly) from linux. 

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

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