[parted-devel] Mac Peculiarities

[Anant Narayanan]

Hi!

I had a nice time trying out parted on my new Macbook Pro. It works 
great for the most part and beats OS X's diskutil anyday, but there are 
places where we could do with some improvement:

1) On resizing another of my existing fat32 partitions with:

resize 4 100GB 120GB

the resizing happens, but the `msftres' flag gets activated for no 
reason. I cannot revert the flag's status with `set' (and of course 
neither with toggle, since toggle depends on set). This flag results in 
my not being able to read/write to the partition from Mac OS X or Linux. 
(probably because msftres means `Microsoft Restricted Paritition'?!)

2) Creating a new partition with the following command:

mkpart mynewpart hfsx 80GB 100GB

does create the partition but using the `print' command consequently 
shows the new partition as `fat32' instead of `hfsx'. On viewing the 
same partition on Mac OS X however, I discovered that it was indeed hfsx 
, not fat32.

3) I am unable to resize OS X formatted hfsx partitions. I receive the 
message:

`Invalid Magic Numbers at beginning of disk'

Bug #2 is fairly trivial, while the others require a bit more thought.

I was also curious as to whether there are any plans to port Mac OS X? 
diskutil is the only proper partitioning tool available right now, but 
its functionality is extremely limited. Parted works fantastic and is an 
excellent candidate for being OS X's de-facto partitioning tool, 
especially because of its support for GPT tables and HFS+ partitions.

Has anyone explored this yet? I am quite excited with the prospect of 
porting to OS X :)

My hands are quite tied right now, but I expect to have a little more 
free time after August 21 (SoC 2006 ends). Apart from Real Partition ID 
support and Machine Readable output, can we put porting parted to Mac OS 
X on our TODO? Anything wrong with this as far as GNU/FSF is concerned?

Cheers,

- Anant