Re: 1.4.4 doesnt recognize all pdisk partitions

[Ethan Benson]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 12:15:49PM -0200, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> 
> You've convinced me.
> 
> However, is there a "way out" for people in olaf's situation?  Should

i still don't even see what Olaf's situation is, all i saw in the
messages i got was he perceived a need to create an `unallocated'
partition for later use as a GNU/Linux or whatever *nix partition, if
this is the case i really see this as a non-issue, you cannot create
any kind of *nix filesystem in macos.  so you end up creating an
Apple_Free partition with nothing on it, which you can create a real
partition in using parted or mac-fdisk, with a correct partition type
(i know of no OS that uses Apple_Free as its partition type, doing
such is foolishness as i demonstrated)  

so what exactly is Olaf's situation?  

> we tell people in the Parted documentation:
> * Parted doesn't display Apple_Free partitions
> * Parted will delete/create Apple_Free partitions as it wishes

this is good, i would add that this is what every other known mac
partitioner does.  just to make it absolutely clear parted is not
doing anything unusal.  this is how its supposed to work. 

> * if you have data on an Apple_Free partition (!), you should
> use pdisk to change the partition from Apple_Free to something
> sennsible (like Apple_UNIX_SVR2)

this is a decent warning i suppose, however mac-fdisk cannot change
partition types, you can only delete and recreate the partition
(attempting to create it with the same boundries, yuk) 

i really do wish there was a way to change the partition type in
parted without creating the filesystem.  i know you don't want to
allow setting arbitary types, but what about some switch to mkfs that
changes the type without touching the partition's data?  mkfs -t 2
ext2 maybe?  as parted is there is no way at all to change a partition
into say HFS since HFS is not supported by parted.  

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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