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Your Daily WTF
23 Dec 2007 15:31OS X, XP, and Ubuntu on a Mac...
It's like putting FDR, Churchill, and Stalin in a room and asking them to cut up Germany.
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[Update 16:50] I give up, no triple boot. Too damn hard. Apple BIOS won't present a FW disk as a bootable device to grub, and I can't figure out how to sneak a /boot partition onto the disk without causing serious damage.
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[Update 17:06] From the Boot Camp instructions: "Even though Boot Camp pre-formats the Windows partition, this partition can’t be used to boot the computer. You must reformat the new Windows partition using the Windows installer."
The partition is pre-formatted, but a format is required? WTF.
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[Update 17:14] So ... the Windows partition has to use precisely the space denoted by the "BOOTCAMP" partition--if it spills out (there's 200MB of empty space before it), Windows won't boot. If you delete the BOOTCAMP partition in the XP installer and create a new partition, Windows won't boot. If you leave BOOTCAMP alone and create a /boot in the 200M of empty space, Windows won't boot. If you assumed it was some internal XP disk partition ordering problem and delete the 200M /boot and recreate it by shrinking BOOTCAMP, Windows won't boot. Oh, and if Windows won't boot, the Windows CD won't boot either.
If the GPT partition table and the MBR partition table get out of sync, Windows won't boot. Well ok, that's not Apple's fault--it's the fault of the GPT designers (Microsoft?) who create this scheme:
First, the MBR is given a "EFI GPT" partition code, and the first partition of the MBR is a "EFI GPT" partition that happens to overlay the actual GPT table. That's perfectly ok; Apple embeds a "Where are my files?" HFS filesystem into every HFS+ filesystem.
But they couldn't leave well enough alone--no, the MBR _mirrors_ the GPT! So now there are two partition tables on the disk, and they have to be synchronized. If you fail to do this (parted/fdisk/diskutil crash, disk corruption, old DOS partitioners), your tables are out of whack, and *BOOM* you die.
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[Update 22:57] Turns out that XP only edits the MBR version of the table even if there's a GPT on the disk. Hence, if you use Disk Manager to change the layout of a disk... the tables go out of sync, and poor stupid OSX goes *boom*.
It's like putting FDR, Churchill, and Stalin in a room and asking them to cut up Germany.
---
[Update 16:50] I give up, no triple boot. Too damn hard. Apple BIOS won't present a FW disk as a bootable device to grub, and I can't figure out how to sneak a /boot partition onto the disk without causing serious damage.
---
[Update 17:06] From the Boot Camp instructions: "Even though Boot Camp pre-formats the Windows partition, this partition can’t be used to boot the computer. You must reformat the new Windows partition using the Windows installer."
The partition is pre-formatted, but a format is required? WTF.
---
[Update 17:14] So ... the Windows partition has to use precisely the space denoted by the "BOOTCAMP" partition--if it spills out (there's 200MB of empty space before it), Windows won't boot. If you delete the BOOTCAMP partition in the XP installer and create a new partition, Windows won't boot. If you leave BOOTCAMP alone and create a /boot in the 200M of empty space, Windows won't boot. If you assumed it was some internal XP disk partition ordering problem and delete the 200M /boot and recreate it by shrinking BOOTCAMP, Windows won't boot. Oh, and if Windows won't boot, the Windows CD won't boot either.
If the GPT partition table and the MBR partition table get out of sync, Windows won't boot. Well ok, that's not Apple's fault--it's the fault of the GPT designers (Microsoft?) who create this scheme:
First, the MBR is given a "EFI GPT" partition code, and the first partition of the MBR is a "EFI GPT" partition that happens to overlay the actual GPT table. That's perfectly ok; Apple embeds a "Where are my files?" HFS filesystem into every HFS+ filesystem.
But they couldn't leave well enough alone--no, the MBR _mirrors_ the GPT! So now there are two partition tables on the disk, and they have to be synchronized. If you fail to do this (parted/fdisk/diskutil crash, disk corruption, old DOS partitioners), your tables are out of whack, and *BOOM* you die.
---
[Update 22:57] Turns out that XP only edits the MBR version of the table even if there's a GPT on the disk. Hence, if you use Disk Manager to change the layout of a disk... the tables go out of sync, and poor stupid OSX goes *boom*.
