Arun Sharma writes:
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 12:09 AM, Siju George <[email protected]> wrote:

>> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 10:42 PM, Arun Sharma <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > * Some BIOSes don't support booting from a GPT formatted disk (HP
>> laptops)
>> >
>> 
>> What about BIOSes that come with the old AMD athalon/sepmron systems?
>> Do they support booting from GPT?
>> 

> I suspect the old BIOS still reads the first sector of the hard drive and
> jumps into it. I haven't yet looked into how control is transferred to grub
> after that. 

So GRUB is capable of booting from GPT disks, hmm...? In non GPT disks,
GRUB embeds itself into the first 63 sectors of the disk. That code has
the list of sectors, from where to load the 1.5stage and 2nd stage
filesystem loaders, encoded at the time of installation of GRUB on the
boot sector.

> Any mechanism that doesn't look at the legacy partition table should
> be ok. There is something called a "protective MBR" on GPT systems
> that is designed to prevent tools from messing with GPT data
> structures.

Is the code present in the *protective MBR* is also same (like 0th
sector zero'ed (or 0xFF'ed) except the partition table entry for GPT
partition) for all GPT disks ?

> It seems strange that HP has a patent on this topic!

They have patent for everything. I'm sure they even have a patent on
pressing a magic key during startup to enter BIOS setup..:p

-- 
Ashish SHUKLA

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