Re: Installation on Macbook Pro

[Christopher Rawnsley <rawprawns@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9 Mar 2008, at 23:18, Chris Turner wrote:
> Disclaimer: I don't have a macbook.. (or any intel mac)
>
> ad4 : I've seen this as the first HDD on an Acer notebook, a shuttle  
> xPC, and a tyan server board - In my case it had to do with both the  
> presence of a legacy parallel ATA controller (ad0-3), and a SATA  
> controller (ad4-..) . If e.g. the CD-ROM/DVD/etc. is on PATA (which  
> I suspect to be the case), it is likely the reason that the first  
> HDD is showing up as ad4.
>
> In my case, it hasn't been any kind of problem.

Ah thank you for shedding some light on this. I'll see if I can find  
any more information on it.

> For the disklabel problem:
>
> typically I haven't labelled individual slices, but on occasion, it  
> seems like disklabel -r gets confused if there is some residual data  
> there.. you might try a manual install (see /README on the CD) and  
> zeroing out that portion of the disk

Interesting... How would this residual data get there? Could it be  
caused by an odd partitioning table? I remember reading that Intel  
Macs use a hybrid GPT/MBR scheme.

> I've unfortunately had some problems with native mode SATA which may  
> or may not be related here (was HT1000 specific) - haven't had a  
> chance to track down the bug. If it's possible to force 'legacy  
> parallel' mode
> in the apple machine, that might help things.

I'm not sure if there is a way to explicitly do this but I think that  
it drops into this mode if I boot what the Apple boot loader thinks is  
a Windows disk. I have actually tried using rEFIt[1] to see if that  
yields any different results.

> Sorry you ran into problems & good luck - and do let us know if you  
> find something out


We'll do and you don't need to apologise. I have been following DF a  
while now and really want to get it running :)

--
Chris

[1] http://refit.sourceforge.net/