On 2013-03-19 22:07, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
The GPT partitioning spec requires the disk to be FDISK partitioned with just one single FDISK partition of type EFI, so that tools which predate GPT partitioning will still see such a GPT disk as fully assigned to FDISK partitions, and therefore less likely to be accidentally blown away.
Okay, I guess I got entangled in terminology now ;) Anyhow, your words are not all news to me, though my write-up was likely misleading to unprepared readers... sigh... Thanks for the clarifications and deeper details that I did not know! So, we can concur that GPT does indeed include the fake MBR header with one EFI partition which addresses the smaller of 2TB (MBR limit) or disk size, minus a few sectors for the GPT housekeeping. Inside the EFI partition are defined the GPT, um, partitions (represented as "s"lices in Solaris). This is after all a GUID *Partition* Table, and that's how parted refers to them too ;) Notably, there are also unportable tricks to fool legacy OSes and bootloaders into addressing the same byte ranges via both MBR entries (forged manually and abusing the GPT/EFI spec) and proper GPT entries, as partitions in the sense of each table. //Jim _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
