Installing 10.3 under MOL

[Samuel Rydh]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 10:39:42AM +0000, Brian Ruth wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Has anyone tried installing OS 10.3 under MOL? The installer starts up fine,
> and works okay until you get to selecting which disc to install onto. At this
> point, it shows me the MOL disc, but won't let me select it, telling me that
> I 'cannot boot from this disc'. This must be something new in 10.3, since 
> 10.2 doesn't have the same problem - it does allow me to select the disc.
> 
> I've tried marking the disc with the 'boot' flag in molrc.osx,
> but that doesn't
> seem to make a difference to 10.3. Am I missing something, or is this a new
> 'enhancement' from Apple...?

The installer wants a disk with partition tables. MOL only presents
the partition itself. One workaround is initializing the volume under
OSX (running MOL). Then MacOS X will install an partition table
as well as the volume itself. That is, e.g. /dev/hda7 will then 
ontain a partition table as well as the HFS volume.

The drawback is that OSX without MOL might not be able
to find a HFS volume partitioned in this way (encapsulated
partition tables might not be supported). At least it
won't be possible to boot from such a volume.

One can also address the problem by exporting the entire /dev/hda
device to MOL (using -force and -whole). One problem here
is that if /dev/hda contains a linux mounted partition then
MOL might refuse to export it as read-write.

/Samuel