Installation on Macbook Pro

[Chris Turner]

Christopher Rawnsley wrote:
first step is to partition the drive. I choose my hard drive which is 
detected as being 'ad4' (which struck me as odd. I thought they started 
at 0?). I have a 120GB drive of which I want to install DragonFly to a 
15GB slice. The installer tells me that it format is successful and then 
asks how I would like to set up my partitions (or sub-partitions). I 
stuck with the default and continue. Then get:

Execution of the command
/sbin/disklabel-r ad4s3
 >/tmp/install.disklabel.ad4s3
FAILED with a return code of 4.
Disclaimer: I don't have a macbook.. (or any intel mac)

ad4 : I've seen this as the first HDD on an Acer notebook, a shuttle 
xPC, and a tyan server board - In my case it had to do with both the 
presence of a legacy parallel ATA controller (ad0-3), and a SATA 
controller (ad4-..) . If e.g. the CD-ROM/DVD/etc. is on PATA (which I 
suspect to be the case), it is likely the reason that the first HDD is 
showing up as ad4.

In my case, it hasn't been any kind of problem.

For the disklabel problem:

typically I haven't labelled individual slices, but on occasion, it 
seems like disklabel -r gets confused if there is some residual data 
there.. you might try a manual install (see /README on the CD) and 
zeroing out that portion of the disk

e.g: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s3c count=32

(can't remember the exact size of the disklabel - I think 32 sectors 
should nuke it.. 1m will definately)

also:

I've unfortunately had some problems with native mode SATA which may or 
may not be related here (was HT1000 specific) - haven't had a chance to 
track down the bug. If it's possible to force 'legacy parallel' mode
in the apple machine, that might help things.

Sorry you ran into problems & good luck - and do let us know if you find 
something out