thestevo Posted October 20, 2006 Share Posted October 20, 2006 My hard drive is partitioned as follows: (Primary) HFS+ - OS X (Primary) NTFS - Windows XP (Primary) NTFS - Windows Vista (Extended Partitions) (Extended) Fat32 - For moving data around (Extended) ext3 - Ubuntu (Extended) Linux Swap) (/Extended Partitions) When I first installed OS X it recognized both NTFS partitions and the Fat32. All was going well, so I tried to set my Firefox profile to one on my Fat32 that I share among all the partitions. It didn't load. I configured the configuration file properly, I know the path was right, but when Firefox loaded it would say that Firefox is already loaded. I read that signified an inability to load the profile. I could look at files in the finder but still no soap. So, I moved on to working on other things. Next reboot, Fat32 partition is gone. I look in the Disk Utility, and it shows no extended partitions at all. NTFS partitions are still there, but none of the extended ones. So, I had to reinstall for other reasons. I thought that whatever went wrong wouldn't be there this time. I did the same thing, trying to set the Firefox profile, and the extended partitions disappeared again. I know that Firefox can't be getting rid of the OS Xs ability to even see the extended partitions, but oddly enough, thats when it happened both times. Any thoughts or things I can try? Please? Stephen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thestevo Posted October 25, 2006 Author Share Posted October 25, 2006 Well, I'm rather surprised that nobody responded, but I have made a little head way. First of all, I rebooted a number of times and found that one out of maybe twenty boots the extended partitions will appear. When I looked at the Disk Utility when it wasn't showing the partitions it said the disk was 128 GB, which it is not. I did some reading and found out that it may have something to do with the LBA reading ability of OS X for ATA drives. The FAT32 partition is at about 150 GB into the disk, so when it was having troubles reading the LBA it would cut the third partition NTFS short and leave off everything after. I tried Intech's ATA driver in an attempt to solve the problem. The next time I booted the partition was there, but it was gone afterward. When I tried to use kextload to load the driver it said that there was an error with the super (I can give you the exact info if you wish). As for the Firefox. That one time that the drive came back, I tried setting the reference to the location a different way. Instead of editing the profiles.ini file, I used the profilemanager and selected the profile. When I looked at what it put in the profiles.ini file, it was a whole bunch of letters and numbers that had no resemblence to the path as it should be. It worked until I rebooted, then the partition was gone again. I guess now what I need to have answered is, do we know how to fix LBA issues? It must be a software fix, XP SP2 addressed that issue. I have an ASRock 775DUAL-VSTA motherboard. The hard drive is a 200 GB Seagate ATA. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thestevo Posted October 27, 2006 Author Share Posted October 27, 2006 Ok, I got the answer! When I first tried to install OS X on this machine, I tried to use JaS 10.4.7 DVD, but after the install it hangs trying to load the wireless drivers. So, I used 10.4.6. But, when I was installing using 10.4.7 I remembered seeing all the partitions there, which wasn't the case for .6 So, I upgraded to 10.4.7 and there we go! Somebody must have fixed the LBA in the fix, but I was not aware that it was an issue that was addressed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts