DragonFly users List (threaded) for 2008-03
DragonFly BSD
DragonFly users List (threaded) for 2008-03
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Re: Installation on Macbook Pro


From: Christopher Rawnsley <rawprawns@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:20:23 +0000

Here is a little update for my problem...

On 12 Mar 2008, at 02:48, YONETANI Tomokazu wrote:
IIRC, you need to fiddle with ad5*. A better alternative I can think of
is to partition (or maybe even disklabel it and newfs -O1) using FreeBSD
installer first, then boot with DragonFly LiveCD, and continue the rest
of procedure explained in /README .

Formatting with FreeBSD worked fine. FreeBSD appeared to have formatted the disk differently by switching the slice order. So the 165 ID (DragonFly/Free BSD) slice came before my 175 ID (HFS+) slice even though the physical disk layout was the other way round (Significant at all?). I now had a properly sliced drive so I rebooted with DF which could now write to the disk :). Thank you for that, Yonetani.


So I rebooted and this time booted from the hard drive. Boot loader came up! Unfortunately, it couldn't boot the DF slice. So I went back to the CD and (this is where I got a bit stupid...) fired up fdisk to check everything out. Nothing to odd. Had a look at gpt's output too. Which I found to be a little odd. The DF slice shared the same index (of 1) with my EFI slice with Mac OS X at index 2.

Let me first explain that, from what I read, in order for a computer to comply with EFI they have to have an extra slice set aside for EFI. On my laptop that means that I have this in the form of a 200MB slice with the rest for whatever. Now I remember seeing when Mac OS X and Windows was installed, I booted into the DF live CD and ran gpt. The output that time around was EFI slice at 1, Mac OS X at 2 and Windows at 3. Even though I don't think boot0 can boot from the GPT, I wonder whether the FreeBSD installer changed something in a similar way to the MBR. Very speculative, I know but I can't check out anymore 'cause...

Going on my hunch that something in the MBR was wrong and was causing boot0 to not read it properly I decided to open up fdisk and see if I could find anything that might be a cause. I checked each slice through using the -u option (IIRC) and when I got the the Mac OS X slice it complained about the head boundaries being all wrong. I rather stupidly thought that I'd let it automatically update this. This caused nothing to boot etc. Long story short I ended wiping everything in favour of it being quicker for me (I had deadlines to meet...). It was all backed up so hopefully that won't keep anyone awake at night!

I think I will come back to DF in the not so distant future but I'm just going to let myself go on other things for now. Thanks a lot to all you guys who tried to help me. I really appreciate it :)

--
Chris

P.S. Would it be possible to by pass the MBR all together in favour of GPT by simply using another boot loader other than boot0 or would this also require changes in the kernel or elsewhere?



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