Okay, so long story short, I accidentally rendered my EFI-based Mac unbootable. I don't blame parted, I blame my own carelessness, but parted didn't have the ability to repair the broken partition table for me, and since I just spent a week writing code to do so by hand, I'd like to do what it takes to make sure parted has this capability in future. :)
Unfortunately I haven't got a lot of time to contribute to this so I'm really hoping somebody else can take my existing code and use it to see what needs to be done and add that to parted... You may view my darcs repository at http://www.accela.net/~dankna/software/darcs/gpt-tweak/, and I hereby release that code into the public domain. At least, the portion of it which is mine; it also includes the file efi_crc32.c, but that's already in parted anyhow. The problem centers around the UUID in the GPT label that identifies the filesystem type of each partition. Right now parted doesn't explicitly recognize the existence of this UUID; it sets it heuristically, based on the flags. This is sort-of-correct behavior in the sense that there's a particular ID which means "fat16, fat32, ntfs, ext2, ext3, or reiserfs", for reasons that make some sense but that I lack the patience to go into just at this moment. This works fine as long as all the world is either Windows or Linux, but unfortunately there are other OSes that actually care about the value, and in particular the EFI bootloader on Intel Macs will not recognize a partition as HFS+ unless this field has the UUID that means "HFS+". By the way, Andrew? If you're still active on here? I'm certain you don't remember me, but like eight years ago we talked briefly and I promised to write some code for parted and then never did. Hey, I was a highschool student at the time, that's what happens. :) But anyway you impressed me so much that I've sworn by parted in all the intervening years and I just thought I'd say hi and stuff, as long as I'm posting to the list anyway. Let me know whether (as I hope) you all agree that parted should incorporate this feature. Let me know if people need more details to work on this, as I can explain the problem and terminology in more detail... and can point you towards various references and resources. Right now I've spent all the time I really have for tonight just on writing this email, so... get back to me? :) -- Dan Knapp "An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured." (Konrad Adenauer)
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