Leopard, Ubuntu and a FAT32 partition

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.

I don't know anything about rEFIt (boot manager for EFI) or how it works but I can remember from my days of using BootIt Next Generation (for BIOS machines) folks would run into the same problem as you describe.

I suspect it's because the partition table listing for Ubuntu and the GRUB boot loader (however it's laid out for an EFI system) was overwritten by the creation of the empty FAT-32 partition. Not sure there is a work around, but your best bet for info would be to access the rEFIt user forum and ask.

You can find a link to the forum at the bottom of the home page for rEFIt. Good luck and post back if you find a solution.

Regards.

Thanks for your response, the link at the bottom of the rEFIt page leads to a non functioning site unfortunately.