a little help w/firewire drive please

[Gavin Hemphill]

I have a number of firewire drives and both OSX and YDL3.0.1 running on 
all of them (bootable and just data).  I just use pdisk under YDL to add 
the new partition to the existing (Apple) partition table if there is 
"Apple_Free" available.  If you don't have any data on the disk you can 
use the apple disk tools to create a single partition (I load the OS9 
drivers as a matter of habit but they're not necessary unless you have a 
machine that will boot into OS9), then delete the HFS partition and make 
up your own scheme - see below.

A couple of things to note:  You have to be root to run pdisk, and when 
you create the new partition for linux you have to use the "C" (create 
with type command) and the type is "APPLE_UNIX_SVR2" for linux 
partitions  the name can be whatever you want.  I usualy add 2 
partitions (both APPLE_UNIX_SVR2 type), one for swap (about 2Gig) and 
one which will be ext2 or ext3.  I even have the machine happily booting 
off a couple of firewire drives.
after you have created the new partitions, you need to do a mkswap 
/dev/sd?n for the swap partition and a mkfs -j /dev/sd?n to make an ext3 
partition.  the "?" is the drive letter and the "n" is the appropriate 
partition number.

Here's what one of my disks looks like.  I personally put my bootstrap 
partition first (right after the Apple_Patches partition, with my HFS 
partition second, and my Linux partitions (which I've used on both X86 
boxes and on my TiPowerbook) last.

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/sda'
  #:                type name               length   base      ( size )
  1: Apple_partition_map Apple                  63 @ 1
  2:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh              56 @ 64
  3:      Apple_Driver43*Macintosh              56 @ 120
  4:    Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh              56 @ 176
  5:    Apple_Driver_ATA*Macintosh              56 @ 232
  6:      Apple_FWDriver Macintosh             512 @ 288
  7:  Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh             512 @ 800
  8:       Apple_Patches Patch Partition       512 @ 1312
  9:     Apple_Bootstrap untitled            62912 @ 1824      ( 30.7M)
10:           Apple_HFS "MacAlly60"      79396736 @ 64736     ( 37.9G)
11:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap              2097152 @ 79461472  (  1.0G)
12:     Apple_UNIX_SVR2 root             35651584 @ 81558624  ( 17.0G)
13:          Apple_Free Extra                  32 @ 117210208

You also can get extfs for MacOS 10.3  I think it was on the "apple OS X 
software page" but a google will turn it up.

	G++

newsman@verizon.net wrote:
>>From: Clinton MacDonald <clint.macdonald@sbcglobal.net>
>>Date: 2004/08/02 Mon PM 02:54:40 CDT
>>To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
>>Subject: Re: a little help w/firewire drive please
>>
>>Mr. Newsman:
> 
> 
> Actually it's Dr. Newsman, but that's another topic.
> 
>>newsman@verizon.net wrote:
>>
>>>I'd like to have two partitions on the external drive: 1 for
>>>OS X and the other for Linux. First question---does it make
>>>good sense to make both partitions bootable? I already used
>>>Disk Utility in OS X to set up the OS X partition (HFS+). I
>>>placed the "free space" partition first and the OS X
>>>partition second per the instructions in the YDL installation
>>>guide.
>>
>>This sounds like a lot of work. What, exactly, are you trying to 
>>accomplish? Both Mac OS X and Yellow Dog Linux will recognize HFS, HFS+ 
>>(if you are running the correct kernel), and DOS/FAT formatted drives. 
>>You might be better off to format the drive in one of those so that you 
>>can access it from both YDL and OS X.
>>
>>Unless I have misunderstood what you are trying to do.
> 
> 
> Basically, I want to use the firewire drive as a backup/storage unit. When 
> you install YDL, you first format the OS X partition using OS X disk utility, 
> leaving the other partition as "free space" for YDL. You then do the YDL 
> install and set up the remaining partition(s) for Linux. That's what I 
> thought I should do in this case.
> 
> Since I'm only using the firewire drive for storage, it would seem that I do 
> not have to worry about making either one or both of the partitions bootable. 
> So, again, what specific partitioning tool should I use in YDL to partition 
> that part of the firewire drive that is currently sitting there as "free 
> space" without wiping out the HFS+ partition that is already there?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> yellowdog-general mailing list
> yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general
> HINT: to Google archives, try  '<keywords> site:terrasoftsolutions.com'