Mac OS not booting

[Hollis Blanchard]

I think I've run across a moderate-sized bug in parted-1.4.4. It seems that
whenever I modify my partition table with parted, the Mac OS cannot understand
the resulting map.

Open Firmware can, so the result is the Mac OS starting to boot (as OF exec's
the Mac OS ROM file), only to present a flashing question mark (can't find a
System Folder) immediately after. When I boot into the Mac OS from a boot CD,
the Mac OS partition is not mounted, and Drive Setup (Apple's disk-formatting
utility) cannot mount it either (with the descriptive error "Unable to mount
volumes"). Hard Disk Toolkit (a 3rd-party formatter from FWB) can, however.

This already burned me and forced a complete Mac OS reinstall, so this time I
had partition map dd backups ready. :)

I originally thought this only occured when running 'set X boot on', but it
also happened when adding a swap partition to Apple_Free space as well
(leaving the existing partitions untouched).

Here's something for comparison:
PMAP-boot is a working partition map (the first 15 blocks) (I used pdisk to
change the type of partition 6 from Apple_HFS to Apple_Bootstrap, and the Mac
OS was fine with that).
PMAP-partedboot is a non-working partition map, which resulted from me running
(only) 'set 6 boot on'.

hexdump and diff show quite a few changes in the first block (which I wouldn't
expect to change much)... but what do I know. :)

Anyways, I'm going to sleep; just thought you should hear about it... this is
Mac OS 9.0.4 on a B&W G3.

-Hollis

PMAP-boot
Description: Binary data

PMAP-partedboot
Description: Binary data