On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Ashish SHUKLA <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 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 ? Right - there were no GPT specific issues. > > 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 OS was booted from a GPT formatted disk. But it doesn't seem to like GPT formatted external disks. > > > > 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 :). I think this is done for compatibility with OSes that are not GPT aware. As long as the GPT-unaware OS touches only the first 3 partitions, things will work fine. GPT-aware OSes are required to use the GPT table instead of the MBR as long as one of the four primary partitions is of type 0xee. > Did you tried FreeBSD's gptboot ? I think it also lets user boot from > GPT disk without need of EFI. > No - I used grub to chainload the FreeBSD bootloader. I'd been trying to boot FreeBSD from my Mac's EFI implementation. But that ran into rough weather because Mac's implementation requires a 64 bit EFI environment. FreeBSD's boot.efi doesn't work (yet) in the 64 bit mode. Only 32 bit EFI is supported. Given the popularity of Macbook Pro among the geeky crowds in the western hemisphere, I'm hoping that someone will figure out a solution soonish. -Arun
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