Bugzilla – Bug 13311
Mac partition tables not supported
Last modified: 2019-01-25 10:35:09 UTC
I just got a new Iomega MiniMax external hard drive, which comes formatted with a legacy Mac-style partition table. The Fab4 kernel supports MBR and GUID partition tables, but not the legacy Mac kind, so it can only see the first partition on the drive (which is not the one with my music on it). The solution should be to just set CONFIG_MAC_PARTITION=y in the kernel config.
Why not just reformat it?
I actually have, in the interests of getting it to work. :) But most users don't have any idea what a partition table _is_, let alone how to change the type. (It's possible to do so with Disk Utility, but only destructively, and it's not obvious; not sure what the Windows UI is.) Adding the option in the build could save some support calls/headaches.
I agree with Jacob, 99% of our users won't know what to do in this case. Dan, do you think this would be up to TS to handle? Maybe come up with a FAQ on the limitations of this feature?
I'd need a better understanding of how common this partition table is. You call it a "legacy" partition table... meaning it's been deprecated by newer tables? If it's semi-common I'd like to know what our options are. If it's far from common, it sounds like a support issue and/or a FAQ.
It's "legacy" in that Apple isn't shipping their own machines formatted with it anymore; they've switched to GUID partition tables. However, a fair number of manufacturers of external drives marketed at Macs are still using it. (Mine is an Iomega MiniMax, purchased brand new eariler this month at Fry's.) The problem use case is something like this: - User buys drive, starts using it for Time Machine backup - User notes that Fab4 will only work with a FAT32 partition, and so opens up Disk Utility to do a resize-and-make-new-partition operation. - After loading up the FAT32 partition with music, user connects drive to Fab4. Fab4 doesn't properly support the Apple partition table, and so only sees the first (unsupported, HFS, musicless) partition. I'm not sure how Fab4/TinySC deals with drives with some supported filesystems and some unsupported filesystems, but that would be a separate bug. I can't think of any support/robustness reason not to just add the Apple partition table code to the kernel.
*** Bug 18065 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***