RJV Bertin wrote:
It does beg the question if installs are still universal in the sense that one can boot any Mac off any disk?
Installs are universal only to the extent that they will boot any Mac their included hardware drivers support. So if say you have a Mac with newer hardware, a boot disk that has drivers only for older hardware won't work with it.
I'm pretty sure MBR partition tables can coexist with GUID partition tables - it's how disks can be made visible to MS Windows.
Intel Macs rely on a hybrid MBR implementation to be able to boot from both OS X & Windows. The problem with hybrid MBR's is there is no industry-wide standard for them, & disk utilities that work fine with one OS's hybrid MBR implementation may clobber another's. Complicating things even more, NTFS is actually a proprietary file system owned by Microsoft, which doesn't publicly disclose all the details of its implementation, which may change from time to time. All non-Windows utilities that create or modify NTFS volumes rely to some extent on reverse engineering the MS standard & that can sometimes leads to odd problems (which is why Boot Camp Assistant doesn't actually do the NTFS formatting, leaving that to the Windows installer).
