> Drive Setup is a very weak program, that AFAIK allows only integral
numbers
> of M to be typed in.
thats why you should NOT use drive setup to create linux partitions.
please read and follow:
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/doc/mac-fdisk-basics.txt
you need to create only TWO partitions with drive setup, the first is
a placeholder for ALL your linux partitions, the second is for macos.
IMO, you don't need any Mac utilities to partition a disk exclusively for
LINUX. What you need "Drive Setup" or "Hard Disk Toolkit" for is to install
a MacOS compatable disk driver and associated partitions which OpenFirmware
uses to boot MacOS. So you only need to run one of these programs once, IF
you plan to run MacOS at any time in the future, and then leave all of your
other partitioning tasks to Linux. So let whatever program installs a disk
driver do its own thing and if it only creates one partition (like older
Apple disk utilities would do), don't worry, just delete their single
partition and repartition things as needed. When you start up MacOS, it
will tell you that the new partitions are unreadable and individually,
it ask you if you want to initialize (erase) them. Click on "Initialize"
and you'll have a fresh, clean HFS partition. That's worked fine back
from MacPlus days, even on the early Apple disk drivers which supposedly
didn't support multiple MacOS partitions.
if you don't plan to keep macos skip drive setup alltogether and make
a clean empty table with mac-fdisk (see my doc, its the `i' command).
Be aware, though, that you won't be able to access any HFS partitions on
that disk from MacOS, even if you boot MacOS from floppy or a ZIP drive.
You need those funny extra partitions that Drive Setup or equivalent
create to do that.
with HFS+ you can boot the kernel and ramdisk, but you CANNOT install
anything from there, so base, drivers, and rescue will have to be
fetched from http. linux has NO support for HFS+.
The longstanding problem with HFS is that it's very inefficient for large
disks because they didn't allocate enough bits for disk addresses back in
the 128K Mac days. If you must share a drive between MacOS and LINUX, i
suggest creating small MacOS partitions (<< 1GB) if you have lots of small
files. The only problem with that is that it makes for a busy /etc/fstab
file and a more cluttered MacOS desktop.
-- Tovar
