[parted-devel] bug in mac disklabel support

[Andrew Gaffney]

I've found what appears to be a bug (or at least a misbehavior) in parted when 
operating on mac disklabels. Mac disklabels apparently require all sectors on 
the disk to be owned by a partition. It has the Apple_free partition type as a 
placeholder for unallocated space.

Here's the situation. I had 10GB unallocated space at the end of my disk. I 
created an ext2 partition at a 3.4GB offset from the end of the last partition. 
I then exited parted and ran mac-fdisk, which showed me the following:

/dev/hda4 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 root     54281512 @ 1050240  ( 25.9G) Linux native
/dev/hda5 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled 11718751 @ 62500000 (  5.6G) Linux native
/dev/hda6      Apple_Free Extra     7168248 @ 55331752 (  3.4G) Free space
/dev/hda7      Apple_Free Extra     3980881 @ 74218751 (  1.9G) Free space

Even though the Apple_free partition is *physically* before the new partition on 
the disk, parted created it *after* the new partition in the partition table. 
The last Apple_free partition there is space I did not use when creating the new 
partition. While this probably won't cause too many problems, it seems like 
quite a silly thing for parted to do.

-- 
Andrew Gaffney                            http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer                                   Installer Project