Arun Sharma writes: > 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. So nothing due to GPT ? BtW, the issue I encountered while setting up my box is BIOS is not letting my HDDs boot which I found later is due to no partition being marked active in MBR. Fucking Intel BIOSes...:( > 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. lol. > Same for Mac. You get a "Can't read the disk - format disk or eject?" > type of dialog. This is strange. While researching on this I've seen that Apple is the one to support GPT in their EFI based Macs. > 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. I thought of doing this but I didn't understand how would OS kernels tackle this ? Are we going to get 6 device nodes for 3 partitions ? So I dropped the idea :). Did you tried FreeBSD's gptboot ? I think it also lets user boot from GPT disk without need of EFI. > -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. I think FreeBSD team should write a Gentoo installation handbook like document to install from tarballs directly which is the most reliable way of all :-). Ashish SHUKLA -- Optimists say the glass is half-full, Pessimists say the glass is half empty, I says it's time for a beer run.
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