MBR partition table (instead of GPT) on Intel Mac okay for SD?

[pmocek]

Originally Posted by dnanian

this isn't Apple hardware at all, right? It's just a generic box you've managed to get OSX working on, no?

I'm not the original owner, so I can't trace all the parts that make up this computer back to their manufacture (and does Apple manufacture its own hardware, anyway?) but for all practical purposes, yes, you're correct.

Originally Posted by dnanian

This has nothing to do with MBR

Sorry for the confusion. I wasn't really referring to the master boot record, I meant "the MBR partition table scheme" as opposed to "the GPT (GUID partition table) scheme".

Originally Posted by dranian

it's because the source partition doesn't have the proper standard configuration to be bootable in a standard way

Hmm... I believe it is booting in the standard way, but on a proprietary OS, it's really hard to tell what's going on, so I can't say for sure. (Oh, how I miss the thorough documentation that often comes with free software.)

If you want to test for this situation with "stock" Apple hardware, you could:

• Start with a new, un-partitioned hard disk in an Intel-processor-based Mac
• Create some partitions on it with something other than Apple's Disk Utility, such as fdisk, cfdisk, or sfdisk on GNU/Linux, possibly from a "live CD" distribution like KNOPPIX Linux (mine has three primary partitions and an extended partition that contains several others)
• Perform a standard installation of Mac OS X to one of the primary partition (I installed to the third one)
• Clone to another primary (mine: second), and tell Superduper to set that one as the startup disk

(FYI, I use a registered copy of Superduper on a Pismo all the time and am thoroughly satisfied with it when used for that purpose.)