B&W G3 w/2.5" Laptop HD

[merlin]

Howdy all,

I have a 20GB 2.5" Hitachi laptop drive that I attempted to use in a B&W G3, using a 44-pin-to-40-pin adapter.

I booted off the 2004.1 LiveCD and used mac-fdisk to partition the drive. mac-fdisk reported success every time I attempted to write the partition map, but if I exited then re-launched mac-fdisk, it would behave as if no partition map existed.

The strange thing is that the drive works as expected when connected to my G4 running OS X. In fact, I used pdisk on OS X to set up the partitions, then stuck the drive back in my B&W and booted the LiveCD. The partitions weren't recognized properly by the kernel, but mac-fdisk displayed the partitions as they were. In other words, the /dev/hda? files were wrong, but mac-fdisk saw the correct partition scheme.

Of course, if I tried to edit the disk using mac-fdisk, it would claim success, only to show no partition map upon relaunching mac-fdisk.

So, I'm basically wondering, what could be going on?

[genfoo]

I've seen this before ... sometimes if there's a PC style map leftover on the drive it will conflict with the mac styled one and cause problems ...

I would reccomend to fully zero the drive

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

might take a little bit, but that will ensure there is no PC style mappings left on it .. then initialize a new mac partition map, partition, and go from there ... it worked for me before