Installation on Macbook Pro

[Christopher Rawnsley]

On 9 Mar 2008, at 23:18, Chris Turner wrote:
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.
Ah thank you for shedding some light on this. I'll see if I can find  
any more information on it.

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
Interesting... How would this residual data get there? Could it be  
caused by an odd partitioning table? I remember reading that Intel  
Macs use a hybrid GPT/MBR scheme.

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.
I'm not sure if there is a way to explicitly do this but I think that  
it drops into this mode if I boot what the Apple boot loader thinks is  
a Windows disk. I have actually tried using rEFIt[1] to see if that  
yields any different results.

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


We'll do and you don't need to apologise. I have been following DF a  
while now and really want to get it running :)

--
Chris
[1] http://refit.sourceforge.net/