Ok.

Frankly, my familiarity with Kickstart ends with understanding that it is for producing files which execute graphical logon scripts or allow graphical logon scripting. This means you are doing something completely different than most people. Probably, I'm sure for good reason, however kickstart will not address the fundamental issue of formatting the the hard drive in the manner previously described.

If the scripts are written such that they do this for you or attempt to, that could be a problem as no script or macro should be running around formatting anything without the correct procedural steps. You have to just forego do this macro or script and do each procedure manually -- at least then, you'll control exactly each procedure at each step. Of course, the other way is to write your own scripts, but before you consider that make sure you do know each manual step and command necessary to proceed successfully to the next procedure. It will be a lot faster for you to see what is needed, test the process and document each step and procedure you engage upon until you develop a successful workflow. Then you can write a script to emulate all that. At least that's how I would write such a script.

The problem will remain Apple's Disk Utility of course; because only it can reformat the hard drive from Apple's proprietary format to what it calls Free Space. No matter how you cut it or what you do, if that is drive is not reformatted such that the entire drive is structured by Apple's Disk Utility as Untitled for the name of the partition and formatted as Free Space which Linux can then see; you will continue to have problems in this area. By the way, you do know that this can only be done by using the install system disk which came with the mac and invoke Disk Utility from within that system disk.

Kickstart however, is a part of Linux anyway, it can't help with this.

Suggestion: Let's suppose you did everything right the first time. Then there should be no discrepancies between your setup and other Linux or YDL or Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution as to how each partition appears to parted or fdisk or pdisk. Make a comparison with what you posted here as your drive's geometry and just see what others share regarding their systems. I posted to this list an output of mine.

When everything is done right you can see clearly where the mount points are and which is what. The only difference you would have as your intention is not to use OS X will be that there should be no hfs+ or hfs other than the Apple Bootstrap partition (which is explained in the YDL manual I recommended). After you collect this information from others , you'll see pretty quickly the truth of what I told you earlier; your setup is nonstandard.

You can choose to let it be and carry on ... it may work as it; until one day ....

Or you can re-examine the details of what step may have been missed or overlooked and eventually you may achieve a standard Linux partition structure. By the end of it all, you may believe you qualify for Enlightenment, Sainthood or the Nobel Peace Prize -- but what you will have in fact is a standard functional and stable Linux.

As a rule, never trust scripts or macros unless you know each and every step what the program does.

Good Luck ....

On Feb 28, 2006, at 4:06 PM, Keith Mitchell wrote:


I have actually done all that... but I am installing these machines via kickstart (i.e. without the normal GUI).... perhaps that is broken.

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