Re: Can't start installation via yaboot at OpenFirmware prompt

[Josh Huber <huber@debian.org>]

Kent West <westk@nicanor.acu.edu> writes:

> I went back and deleted the partition, and rebooted before
> recreating it; the second "drive" no longer showed up in MacOS9. I
> then recreated the partition again using pdisk and giving the
> partition a new name, and after reboot, the "drive" was there, with
> the same name as before and all its data intact. I tried this
> process again, but created a smaller partition (by 2.5M), and after
> reboot, OS 9 still saw the drive as MacShared, and still had the
> data.
>
> So apparently, pdisk simply isn't affecting the partition the way I
> would expect.

I guess it's not.  pdisk only changes the partition table, not any of
the data in the filesystem.  Basically, the partition table is a block
of metadata at the start of the disk which contains the start, length,
type and name of each partition.  The drive name which is displayed in
MacOS is *not* the partition name, it is the name assigned while
creating the HFS filesystem -- *not* the partition.  Let me repeat,
creating the partition does not modify in any way the data located on
the disk specified by that table entry.

MacOS goes through the partition table and tries to mount all
partitions of type Apple_HFS. If it doesn't detect a filesystem on
said partition, it offers to make the filesystem.

Deleting the partion then does not remove the data which was created
by creating the filessytem, and likewise creating the partition again
does not clear any data.

So, basically if you create a partition of the same size as before
things will work as if the partition was never removed.  If you create
a smaller partition than was there before, it may still work -- until
MacOS tries to access data off the end of the partition that is.

Perhaps this is why you're confused?

> Any suggestions?

I hope that helps...

-- 
Josh Huber                                   | huber@debian.org |


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