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5.3 Macintosh Operating System Disk Label Support

MacOS (and OpenFirmware) only understands the mac disk label. Therefore, if you create a new disk label, you should use:

(parted) mklabel mac

Note that for Mac partition maps, you should avoid leaving free space around, because free space regions take up entries in the partition map (and Linux doesn't like having more than 15 entries). For example, if you do:

(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-6149.882 megabytes
Disk label type: mac
Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Name          Flags
1          0.000      0.031              Apple
2          0.031      1.000                            boot
3          1.000   1000.000  ext2        root          root
(parted)  mkpartfs primary ext2 1001 2000
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-6149.882 megabytes
Disk label type: mac
Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Name          Flags
1          0.000      0.031              Apple
2          0.031      1.000                            boot
3          1.000   1000.000  ext2        root          root
4       1001.000   2000.000  ext2

There is 1 megabyte of free space between partitions 3 and 4. You can avoid this, by creating partitions 0.1M apart (in which case, Parted automatically "pushes" them together). So, in the above example, you should do this instead:

(parted) mkpartfs primary ext2 1000.1 2000
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-6149.882 megabytes
Disk label type: mac
Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Name          Flags
1          0.000      0.031              Apple
2          0.031      1.000                            boot
3          1.000   1000.000  ext2        root          root
4       1000.000   2000.000  ext2


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