Jump to content
6 posts in this topic

Recommended Posts

Hello all. I've had a working 10.4.8 install for.. wow. About 6 months now, thanks primarily to this forum. And it's been great. So great. I have/had a dual-boot XP/OSX setup (two partitions on one drive), but after all this time I haven't booted into XP even once, so I decided to can the windows install and just use the space for OSX storage. And that's where the problems began.

 

Disk Util greys out the partition in question so that I am unable to Format it.. or indeed do anything with it. Now, I know that OSX does not like NTFS (and while technically this shouldn't matter if I'm trying to format it) I decided to use a VM to get a copy of linux running and use mkfs.vfat to wipe the physical partition. (Thanks, Parallels.)

 

Well, I sucessfully did that only to find that OSX still thinks the drive is NTFS for some reason. Ironically, the command-line tool fsck_msdos could see the VFAT partition just fine. I rebooted, nothing. Both the Disk Utility and diskutil still think it's NTFS.

 

I used diskutil (commandline) to reformat the partition.. which it SAID was sucessful. Rebooted again, ran diskutil info on it.. STILL thinks it's NTFS.

 

Someone please tell me what I'm missing? Read: Help. :D

Here's some additional madness:

 

I've run:

newfs_hfs -U 501 -G 501 -s -v Storage /dev/disk0s1

 

And now when I do:

 

fdisk /dev/rdisk0

 

I get:

 

Disk: /dev/rdisk0 geometry: 30401/255/63 [488397168 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: 07 0 1 1 - 1023 254 63 [ 63 - 245762307] HPFS/QNX/AUX

*2: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 245762370 - 242629695] HFS+

3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

 

 

And still Disk Utility believes it to be NTFS, as does the commandline diskutil. When I run:

 

diskutil info /root/disk0s1

 

I get:

 

Device Node: /dev/disk0s1

Device Identifier: disk0s1

Mount Point:

Volume Name:

 

Partition Type: Windows_NTFS

Bootable: Not bootable

Media Type: Generic

Protocol: ATA

SMART Status: Verified

 

Total Size: 117.2 GB

Free Space: 0.0 B

 

Read Only: No

Ejectable: No

Apple is unable to write to NTFS. therefore, i see no reason to believe its capable of partitioning it. you might as well get yourself Partition Magic and partition it that way.

 

i know its hell, i have a triple boot setup, and i need to format my 80gb drive Fat32 and make it a data drive to communicate between OS X and Linux/XP

Apple is unable to write to NTFS. therefore, i see no reason to believe its capable of partitioning it. you might as well get yourself Partition Magic and partition it that way.

 

i know its hell, i have a triple boot setup, and i need to format my 80gb drive Fat32 and make it a data drive to communicate between OS X and Linux/XP

 

Well, and just theorizing here.. but a partition is a holder for a filesystem, right? So why not be able to delete and then re-create the container, and then the filesystem inside.

 

But that's become a moot point now, actually. The drive is currently formatted in FAT32, and Disk Utility and one command line tool say it's NTFS, yet another command line tool recognizes that it is, in fact, FAT32. It also detected when the drive was formatted at HFS.

 

Still, OSX won't touch it. I just managed to install linux on another partition, but my Darwin boot manager just lost the option to boot to hd(1,0). I tried to specify exactly that on the Darwin boot manager prompt, and yet here I am back in OSX.

 

Ah, the days of just editing boot.ini. :D

×
×
  • Create New...