On 12/07/2010 12:06 PM, Heiko Baums wrote:
Am Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:06:45 -0700
schrieb "John T. Wilkinson"<[email protected]>:
I believe this is accurate. I have used GPT for large raid arrays on
other Linux distros. The prevailing way to deal with GPT is to leave
it out of the installer, configure the OS on a non GPT partition,
then after install to use parted to make the GPT partitions. I
believe to boot to a GPT partition you need EFI or UEFI, booting to
GPT from a regular bios is not well supported, and most motherboards
presently do not have EFI/UEFI except for some enterprise servers.
Not quite right as far as I know. It was primarily intended for
EFI/UEFI, but now runs with BIOS, too.
I know there have been attempts to patch grub to work with GPT, and grub
2 is supposed to include support, but I think there are still issues and
this does not always work (see http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/bios.html
for example), hence my statement that booting from GPT with a bios is
not "well supported" currently.
But first installing a system and then make GPT partitions wouldn't
make much sense particularly if you need to install the system onto a
partition bigger than 2 TB even if this partition only contains /home.
A good first step that would put Arch beyond other distros from what
I've seen would be support for non-boot GPT partitions in the
installer via parted.
There should not only non-boot GPT partitions. It should be possible
to be able to building the whole partitioning scheme as GPT.
I don't know if it would be possible to mix MBR and GPT partitions
anyway.
Heiko
This is how things are often done on servers with a lot of storage, I've
done it multiple times myself with large raid arrays: setup a small
disk to hold the OS and boot from using an MBR during install, then
after install, setup a larger disk (or more often RAID array) using GPT
that is used for data.
-JT
