On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Ashish SHUKLA <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> With the help of GRUB2[1], I'm able to boot my box (Intel DG35EC mobo and
> Intel Core 2 Duo CPU) which has both the disks partitioned in GPT. I've
> GNU/Linux and FreeBSD installed as primary operating systems. GRUB2 also
> has support for booting FreeBSD kernels and loading FreeBSD modules[2]
> directly without the need of loader(8).
>

Yes - GPT works great for having many FreeBSD and  Linux partitions on a
large disk. Most of the problems I experienced a few months ago had to do
with generic problems HP laptop BIOSes had booting from external USB disks.
I suspect that the timeout programmed in the BIOS is too small and before
the boot sector could be read, the BIOS moves on to the next bootable
device.

Windows (even the windows 7 beta) continues to have problems reading FAT
partitions from the GPT partitioned disks - although I suspect that there is
some GPT support in the OS. Same for Mac. You get a "Can't read the disk -
format disk or eject?" type of dialog.

The other choice that a BSD user needs to make is whether to a have:

a) Single large protective MBR (partion type 0xee starting from 0 to the end
of the disk)
b) Mirrored MBR (the first 3 partitions the same as GPT, the fourth one
being 0xee). Programs such as gptsync do this. Probably this makes windows
and mac happy - although I haven't really benefited from it.

 -Arun

PS: I  had surprises with the freebsd 7.2 installer when installing to a GPT
disk. Although some pieces of the installer knew about GPT, other parts
didn't and I somehow ended up with a weird MBR partitioned disk. I fixed up
the GPT manually post install.
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