Justin Kelly wrote:
> Don't know.
>> Linux recognizes them as actual partitions and names them /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2
> etc. If it used slices, wouldn't Linux only see one big partition?
>
The linux kernel comprehends a wide range of partitioning/slicing
schemes including BSD disklabels (though that's not what OSX uses either
on PPC or x86 IIRC). Hell, hook up an Amiga Rigid Disk Block
partitioned drive and it can still handle it.
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=tree;f=fs/partitions;hb=HEADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_disklabelhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_Disk_Block
On PPC Macs, OSX uses (and more importantly for a linux install, the
openfirmware expects) the, um, apple mac scheme and a tiny hfs-formatted
bootstrap partition ("yaboot" mostly manages that stuff for you on the
linux side).
HOWEVER, note that ordinary "fdisk" won't work on a ppc-mac-partitioned
disk - it's for the MSDOS format. You need mac-fdisk for mac
partitioned drives. Also, in the mac case, the mac partition table
itself counts as a partition, so the bootstrap partition is partition #2.
http://penguinppc.org/bootloaders/yaboot/doc/yaboot-howto.shtml/ch4.en.shtml
On x86 I think apple switched to EFI GPT by default (maybe with an
option to use real msdos partitions I dunno) - as the old familiar MSDOS
scheme doesn't support partitions larger than 2TB, that's what Microsoft
and to some extent linux now tend towards too. Obviously in the linux
case you can do what you want including use the whole disk without
partitioning it, say, but it's usually best to have a partition table
present, prevents data-lossy misunderstandings by newbie sysadmins and
the like who might think a disk without a partition table is empty - so
the GPT scheme also includes a legacy dummy MSDOS partition table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table#Legacy_MBR_.28LBA_0.29
"parted" is most commonly used for dealing with the GPT partitioning
scheme on linux.
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