houkouonchi Posted April 16, 2008 Share Posted April 16, 2008 I was already very weary of it for doing any type of partitioning as I have heard horror stories but you must be very careful even when just formating pre-existing partitions. My array had 4 partitions on it (mainly used for linux): sda1 (ext3 small 100 MB boot partition) sda4 (NTFS partition) sda2 (ext3 OS partition) sda3 (JFS data partition) Anyway I wasn't using sda4 (NTFS partition) so I decided that I would format that and try using it for mac OS. After all just using the disk-utility for formating is safe, right? WRONG! I clicked on the partition from the disk-utility and chose to format it in journaled HFS. After about 1 second of formatting it brings up a dialog saying "Lost connection to disk manager" (or something of the like) and then when I click ok it brings me back to the disk utility main window and it now only shows a single partition which is sda1 (my 100 MB boot partition). I end up rebooting from a linux boot CD (since my system will no longer boot) and it looks like OSX totally messed with my partition table/scheme (which it shouldn't even have done since I was just formatting. Well it lookes like what happened is now my partitions became: sda1 (ext3 small 100MB boot partition) sda2 (EFI small boot loader partition - Like 100MB) sda3 (HFS partition) sda4 (ext3 OS partition) sda5 (JFS data) So some how it added two partitions and totally screwed up my system. Parted complained about a corrupt partition table but was able to recover the partition list so I deleted the two partitions it created but I had to re-install my boot loader and change a bunch of stuff since it seems to have forever altered the devices of my data/boot partitions. Even now it looks like this (direct output from parted): Disk /dev/sda: 11.0TB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 17.4kB 100MB 100MB ext3 primary 4 20.0GB 50.0GB 30.0GB ext3 primary 5 50.0GB 11.0TB 10.9TB jfs primary Moral of the story: Don't use diskutil unless you have a blank drive or something. If I knew just chosing format would mess with my partitions I would have just formatted the damn thing from linux (since it can format hfs+). I am just really glad I didn't lose any data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
houkouonchi Posted April 21, 2008 Author Share Posted April 21, 2008 Just wanted to bump this again so many people know to be weary of this! Also I ended up re-making my array and making special volumes for both mac/windows so that they shouldn't have problems booting. I installed Mac OS X again on the new volume but it looks like it used some sort of apple partition table and wouldn't boot. I guess I should have made a single partition using another app and then just installed on that. I am not too worried about it getting screwed up again since its an MBR partition table and hopefully it will boot this time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(MoC) Posted April 21, 2008 Share Posted April 21, 2008 Just wanted to bump this again so many people know to be weary of this! Also I ended up re-making my array and making special volumes for both mac/windows so that they shouldn't have problems booting. I installed Mac OS X again on the new volume but it looks like it used some sort of apple partition table and wouldn't boot. I guess I should have made a single partition using another app and then just installed on that. I am not too worried about it getting screwed up again since its an MBR partition table and hopefully it will boot this time. Thanks for alerting us. I'm pretty sure that it's also covered in the wiki. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigPimpin Posted April 22, 2008 Share Posted April 22, 2008 Wary. Not "weary". Weary means your'e tired. Wary means "use with caution". This points out one of the reasons why I'll never be a True Mac Believer. On Linux you have about 6 different utilities to partition and format your disks. On Windows there are 2 or 3 programs besides the built-in utilities that you can use. On a Mac you're pretty much at the mercy of Disk Utility because Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided they knew how to create a filesystem better than anyone else. With a Mac you don't have alternatives for certain things and I don't like being locked in to doing things one way and one way only. OK, on a genuine Mac maybe Disk Utility never screws up. Maybe. When I installed Leopard I found that the only way to get partitions that were acceptable to both OSX and Linux was to (1) partition the disk using a Linux utility (parted/cparted/gparted) and then (2) format that partition using Disk Utility under OSX, and finally (3) going back into Linux to fix a minor problem caused by the DU format. In other words, Linux didn't recognize the partition that IT created once Disk Utility was done formatting it. Weird. I wonder if genuine Macs have this problem? My guess is maybe 1 in 10,000 Mac users ever uses Disk Utility. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
houkouonchi Posted April 22, 2008 Author Share Posted April 22, 2008 Wary. Not "weary". Weary means your'e tired. Wary means "use with caution". Sorry, English is not my strong suite! Thanks for alerting us. I'm pretty sure that it's also covered in the wiki. Where is it in the wiki? I didn't see it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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