Re: Installation on Macbook Pro

[Christopher Rawnsley <rawprawns@xxxxxxxxx>]

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?