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Date:      Mon, 4 Jul 2005 23:49:41 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        Peter Grehan <grehan@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD-ppc on an external hdd (Mac Mini)
Message-ID:  <p0623091abeefb0ddad9b@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <2e583cb2.155ae389.819d300@dommail.onthenet.com.au>
References:  <2e583cb2.155ae389.819d300@dommail.onthenet.com.au>

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At 1:18 PM +1000 7/2/05, Peter Grehan wrote:
>  > At this point with FreeBSD/PPC 6.0-RELEASE happening we
>  > can't stick our heads in the sand anymore.  What type of
>  > labels do we support and which non-Sysinstall programs
>  > does one use when adding a 2nd disk to their system?
>
>Sysinstall for FreeBSD/PPC only understands APM partitions,
>though you should be able to manually create GPT partitions.
>
>My (unrealised) plan for APM partition editing was to pull
>in pdisk.

One of the reasons to create partitions is to split up a huge
disk so it can be used by different operating systems.  In my
case, I'd like to set up my Mac-mini so it could boot up MacOS,
FreeBSD, or OpenBSD.  For that I pretty much need FreeBSD to
support APM-style partitions, because the other OS's aren't
going to support alternate partitioning schemes.

I haven't had the time to try an OpenBSD install yet, but it
looks like it takes a single large APM-style partition, and
then it knows how to split that up for the separate partitions
that it might want.

Could we do that with GPT-style partitions, instead of a single
APM-stype partition?  For PPC on Apple hardware, we already need
to have the boot-loader to be sitting on a HFS+ partition (since
open-firmware can not read our partition formats).  What is the
issue with using GPT-style partitions for boot-disks?  Is it in
finding the boot-loader, or is it the boot-loader itself which
has no support for GPT?  Would there be less of an issue on PPC
since file for the boot-loader itself would not need to be on a
GPT-style partition?

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu



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