Install woes on MacBook2,1

[mjanosi]

At the Select slice you wish to install to I have the following:

ad5p1: 200MB efi
ad5p2: 93056MB apple-hfs
ad5s3: 21217MB Unused Space

When I select ad5s3 and click on Next I get the following error:

PC-BSD Installer Error
(X) Can only install directly to a MBR partition!
Please use 'entire disk' or delete all partitions and create a new one.

[ ok ]

Any clues as to how to get PC-BSD 8.1 installed? 7.x versions installed fine.

[kmoore134]

Thanks for the report. I've fixed this in SVN now for 8.2 / 9. In the meantime,
you may be able to get around that doing an advanced configuration, and selecting /
creating slices on the ad5s3 partition from there.

[mjanosi]

You're welcome. I just downloaded PCBSD8.2-RC1-x64-DVD.iso and the error still exists and the advanced configuration uses the whole disk instead of the slice I want. Dru told me to submit this to the testing@lists.pcbsd.org mailing list, so I'll do that, as well.

[kmoore134]

If you want to install to unused space, can you click the "+" sign and create a new partition first?

[mjanosi]

Per Dru's instruction, I formatted it as ext2:

ad5p1: 200MB efi
ad5p2: 93056MB apple-hfs
ad5p3: 21214MB linux-data

Selecting ad5p3 and hitting next give me the same error regardless of whether
[ ] "Partition with GPT for full disk install" is checked or not and ( ) "Customize Disk Partitions (Advanced)" tries to use the entire disk, not the slice.

After I "- Delete" the slice, trying to "+ Add" does nothing, as if it is being ignored.

[kmoore134]

Ok, that makes more sense now. It looks like you've setup a GPT
partition "ad5p3". Is there a utility
on the mac side to remove that and re-create it as a MBR partition? Such
as "ad5s3".

[mjanosi]

I've used gparted on Ubuntu to format it, I guess I could try using Disk Utility.

[mjanosi]

Oops I shouldn't have tried that. I tried using sysinstall to create the freebsd slice. Here's what my disk looked like before my goof:

DISK Geometry:  232581 cyls/16 heads/63 sectors = 234441648 sectors (114473MB)    
                                                                                  
Offset       Size(ST)        End     Name  PType       Desc  Subtype    Flags     
                                                                                  
         0         40         39        -     12     unused        0              
        40     409600     409639    ad5p1      5    unknown        0              
    409640  190578688  190988327    ad5p2      5    unknown        0              
 190988328   43453320  234441647        -     12     unused        0

Here's what it looked like before the write:

DISK Geometry:  232581 cyls/16 heads/63 sectors = 234441648 sectors (114473MB)    
                                                                                  
Offset       Size(ST)        End     Name  PType       Desc  Subtype    Flags     
                                                                                  
         0         40         39        -     12     unused        0              
        40     409600     409639    ad5p1      5    unknown        0              
    409640  190578688  190988327    ad5p2      5    unknown        0              
 190988328   43453320  234441647    ad5s1      8    freebsd      165              
                                                                                  
                  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐                  
                  │ Writing partition information to drive ad5 │
                  └────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Now my mac won't boot from the hard drive and when I boot from my Leopard DVD and start a terminal
fdisk /dev/rdisk0 shows:

Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd  sec [     start -       size ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
*1: A5 1023 255  63 - 1023  15   63 [ 190988328 -   43453320 ] FreeBSD
 2: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0    0 [         0 -          0 ] unused
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0    0 [         0 -          0 ] unused
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0    0 [         0 -          0 ] unused

Any ideas on how to get my hard disk bootable, again?

[mjanosi]

Whew, I brought my macbook back to life. Here's how:

I downloaded the rescue CD from here:
http://sysresccd.org/Download

then I did:

 /usr/sbin/gdisk /dev/sda
 selected  2 - GPT
 selected p to confirm what the partitions were
 selected w to write to disk and exit

then rebooted

[mjanosi]

I'm back at square one. I've successfully, in the same free space, installed Windows XP, Xubuntu, and I was in the process of Installing Freebsd, when I see the same format that borked my disk the last time:

Offset       Size(ST)        End     Name  PType       Desc  Subtype    Flags     
                                                                                  
         0         40         39        -     12     unused        0              
        40     409600     409639    ad5p1      5    unknown        0              
    409640  190578688  190988327    ad5p2      5    unknown        0              
 190988328   43453320  234441647    ad5s1      8    freebsd

I chose "| = Expert m." for expert mode and tried to create it, but can't figure out what enum is, the help screen shows "create offset size enum subtype flags". My guess is that enum would be what I would need to change ad5s1 to ad5s3. Please, can anyone help?