Re: [BLUG] Anyone encountered GPT yet?

It's the standard for EFI-based systems. I've not yet had the pleasure
of encountering it. I'm looking forward to the day when I don't have to
deal with the old legacy BIOS crap, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Besides, as anyone who has looked at it will tell you, the whole MBR
scheme has, well, significantly lived past any sort of usefulness. It
has a Cylinder/Head/Sector scheme that needed to be worked-around when
the SCSI drives were invented, then again when IDE drives got more than
1024 cylinders. (What, 15 years ago now?) Linux, for one, just totally
ignores at this point. Then there's the fact that it only holds four
entries (thus the need for the "extended" partition table, though you
can not normally boot to "extended" partitions)...

I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of EFI based systems on the mass
market. I know they're in use among certain high-end Intel servers, and
they're also used by the Intel Macs. It is just a matter of time before
everything else follows suit. (Or that's what I've been telling myself
for the past five years.)

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 03:14:46AM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>
> I'm setting up a new backup server with a large disk arrray (4 x 1TB
> drives in RAID-5). When I loaded CentOS 5.2 and went through the
> partition editor, I decided to switch over to the console and run fdisk,
> at which point it told me that fdisk doesn't support GPT partitions.
> This is the first time I've encountered one and had to look it up.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
>
> It looks like my 3ware RAID controller set it up to use GPT for me
> since the volume is 2.8TB in size, which is over the 2TB limit that an
> MBR supports.
>
> I actually couldn't use the GPT format across the whole
> disk array because CentOS complained that the PC BIOS doesn't support
> booting to that type of partition table. So in the RAID controller I
> had to make one smaller volume to boot from and a second volume with the
> GPT table.
>
> Its a good thing to know about if you haven't encountered it yet
> because its coming our way. Especially once we start having 2TB+
> single drives.
>
> --
> Mark Krenz
> Bloomington Linux Users Group
> http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
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> BLUG@linuxfan.com
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Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
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