[PartisanEntity]

Hi all,

I am a bit of a newbie when it comes to OS X tools and applications.

I installed rEFIt. Then I installed Ubuntu next to Leopard. So far so good, rEFIt gives me the option to either boot Leopard or Ubuntu. Great.

I then proceeded to make a FAT32 partition which I would like to use to share files between the two operating systems. I placed this partition between the Leopard and Ubuntu partitions.

After creating the FAT32 partition, rEFIt removed Ubuntu as a booting option and replaced it with a Windows partition (i.e. the empty FAT32 partition).

I then proceeded to remove the FAT32 partition hoping Ubuntu would come back as a booting option, but even after resyncing rEFIt it still only offered me either Leopard or Windows (even though Windows is not installed).

I had to reinstall Ubuntu for it to show up again on the rEFIt menu.

What am I doing wrong?
Thank you.

[ghporter]

rEFIt set up the boot table as you told it to. Then you changed the partition table, which screwed up rEFIt's boot table. If you really NEED that FAT32 partition to be between the OS X and Linux partitions (which is not at all necessary in any functional way), then set up ALL the partitions first, BEFORE you set up rEFIt.

And this isn't something that's specific to rEFIt-any boot manager will be hosed up if you change the partition table it's based on.

[PartisanEntity]

Thanks very much for your response. So would it work if I uninstall rEFIt now, add the FAT32 partition and then reinstall rEFIt ?

[ghporter]

Basically, yes. You want the partition setup to be the way you want it to stay BEFORE you install a boot manager. The boot manager has to use the partition table to identify which partition has which OS on it, and if you make ANY changes to that table, the info the boot manager has won't be accurate.

Partitions stable first, then boot manager.