Booting partition with Master Boot Record

[tdurocher]

I have an issue on my Macbook Pro/10.5.8 opposite to what many people are having. Inadvertently, I partitioned my new Verbatim Quad Interface with MBR, though the formatting is HFS w/Journal (connection is FW800). The thing is, contrary to the documentation, I CAN boot off the clone I made on one of the partitions on this drive! Tried it twice, checked About Mac for confirmation. Ran some sanity checks - the bootable clone worked just fine. I thought this information might be interesting to the community, but I also am concerned that somewhere down the line, I might be end up with a problem. However, I really don't want to go through the entire initial process (which involves copying Tme Machine) again. Do you thing this MBR thing is okay for my bootable drive?

The problem I AM having with this drive - hanging up the whole machine out of Sleep - is I'm guessing a problem with Time Machine and not SD. Although it is odd that my old external drive never exhibited this problem, and it did not have a SD partition on it. Any thoughts here would be appreciated? Thanks.

[dnanian]

Well, most users cannot start up from MBR. Perhaps there are later versions of the ROM that allow it in your case: I don't know why it worked for you. But if it's working, and you're OK with it, and don't mind that it's not a supported configuration, you can certainly go ahead with it.

The other issue, well, sounds like a problem with the drive or some low-level driver... hard to say. Might help to open the Console application before you put it to sleep to see if anything is output to it that might prove useful.

[tdurocher]

Thanks Dave. That is a good point about an "unsupported configuration". With support like you give, I do not want to be unsupported :). One of these days I'll get around to repartitioning without MBR....

[dnanian]

It's more not supported by Apple than not supported by me...

[tdurocher]

I see. Even more reason not to run with it, I guess....