Re: partitioning and booting

[Mich Lanners <mlan@cpu.lu>]

On   1 Mar, this message from Albert Cahalan echoed through cyberspace:
> Besides mac-fdisk and dd, what works for a Mac?

I believe parted also works, but I haven't used it personally.

> So far, I've used dd to put raw copies of my
> data onto all three disks. I'd like to have
> more partitions and/or extend the existing
> main ext2 partition. What is safe to use on
> my Mac? I worry that MacOS or yaboot will freak
> out if the disk size changes.

This is _not_ MS-DOS. There is a place in the partition map that
contains total disk size (maybe repeated in every partition entry, not
sure), but that's it.

Other than that, messing around with partitions is quite
straight-forward (for an experienced hacker like yourself :-).

For instance, what you can do is recreate a new partition map in the
layout that you want, then dd data from old to new. If new partition
matches size of old one, you're done. If new is larger, extend with
apropriate tool. Mac partition tables permit to adjust the size down to
a single block of granularity, which is important when recreating same
size partitions on a larger disk.

I think I've done the copying for ext2 and hfs partitions, changing the
physical location on disk without any ill effects.

Cheers

Michel

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