On Wednesday, September 29, 2004, at 02:56 AM, Duane Cottle wrote:
Partition notes: As I was playing around in the partitioner, I decided to delete the 32.2K partion #1 on the scsi drive called Apple. After the partitions were displayed once again on the screen, I noticed a 32.2K hole on the IDE Master disk at partition #1! It's a new dance I'm learning called the Mac Twist. I'm not experienced with the OF, but maybe that's really a space on the /AAPL/ROM?? Also, I fooled around and selected the entire scsi disk and followed the installer to delete all the partions. Guess what didn't go away! That 32.2K _'taint_meat_ pinch!
You've stumbled on an interesting feature of the Apple Macintosh disk partition scheme -- as implemented in MacOS{789}, MacOS-X, and the Linux partitioning tools "mac-fdisk" and it's cousin "pdisk".
Specifically, there *must* always be a partition 1 on any Macintosh physical disk. That's where the partition table lives. The lowest-level bootstrap firmware expects it to be there, and won't work without it! (Floppy disks and ISO9660 CD-roms are "interesting" exceptions...).
Yes, there are some interesting philosophical questions surrounding the partition table being inside a partition. Ignore them! You'll only get a headache.
The other Macintosh partitions (2-5 on one of my disks -- YMMV) are also needed if you ever intend to boot MacOS9 off of the disk. They hold some low-level driver software needed in the boot process. I've heard someone say that MacOS-X doesn't need these "driver" partitions. I don't know for sure.
Hope this helps! Rick