Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: partman-base
This is a wishlist item, filed at the suggestion of Colin Watson in a
thread on the grub-devel mailing list:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2010-01/msg00202.html
When partitioning a large external USB hard drive on which to install
Ubuntu, there are two competing considerations that the user may have in
mind:
1. Some computers will not be able to boot off the USB hard drive if
/boot is farther than a certain distance from the start of the disk
(i.e. a BIOS boot barrier, a problem which still plagues us nowadays).
Therefore, /boot (or "/", if not separate) should be the first/first-ish
partition, with the bulk of the disk after it.
2. When a USB disk is connected to a Windows system, Windows will mount
the first partition, and ignore any others on the disk. So if the bulk
of the disk is a large FAT32/NTFS partition, then that should be the
first partition.
A nifty way of resolving the conflict between these two is to use an
out-of-order partition table. Partition #1 is the large FAT32/NTFS partition,
but in the disk's physical layout, it is actually the last partition. Partition
#2 is a Linux partition, and is first in the disk's layout. Partitions #3, #4
et al. occupy the space between the end of partition #2 and the beginning of
partition #1. An illustrated example:
|<-sdx2->|<--sdx3-->|<--sdx4-->|<------------sdx1------------>|
Windows will correctly mount and use the "first" partition, and the
Linux boot process (i.e. GRUB2) will sidestep any BIOS limitations
because it doesn't need to read far into the disk to find /boot.
Currently, however, there is no way to produce a partition table like
this in the Ubuntu graphical partitioner. The wish is to make that
possible.
Caveat: Colin mentioned that GRUB2 should eventually have a module
(ata.mod) that would allow its MBR-resident portion to find /boot using
its own disk routines and not those of the BIOS, thereby avoiding any
potential BIOS limitations. For the time being, however, ata.mod appears
not to be stable enough for production use. (And for my part, I'm not
sure whether it'll also be able to do the USB interfacing.)
** Affects: partman-base (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
--
Enable creation of out-of-order partition tables to make Windows-interoperable
USB disks
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/512670
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.
--
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
