Re: Installing onto a >2TB drive

Dances With Crows wrote:
John-Paul Stewart staggered into the Black Sun and said:
Dances With Crows wrote:
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
You can't boot from a >2TB device. Period. On such a device you
must use a gpt partition table (as you did), and no boot loader
currently supports booting off of a gpt labeled device.
Hm. Seems like that'd require the GRUB and LILO people to get a move
on, then. Real-mode assembly is a PITA, for sure, but gpt tables are
only going to get more common.
AFAIK, it's not a GRUB/LILO problem but a BIOS problem. Machines with
EFI firmware (mainly Itanium-based systems) can boot from a GPT
parition table using ELILO. (It was the EFI firmware specification
that first introduced the GPT partition table structure, AIUI.)

Interesting. I wonder whether this is insanely relevant for most users,
since the number of amd64/Core Duo machines >> the number of Itanic
machines. Or did they kludge up some sort of bug-for-bug compatible EFI
workalike for amd64/Core Duo? (I haven't been paying much attention to
all this; the largest RAID I have access to is only 600G and that
machine boots from a 20G RAID-1.)

It's not a huge problem. The problem exists for commercial Unix's
as well... though I think Solaris switched to EFI GPT in version 10.

Which is to say that 99% (or more) of all Solaris installations
can't deal (well) with partitions over 2TB. In fact, it wasn't
all that long ago when Solaris 8 couldn't see DISKS above 1TB.


if your BIOS doesn't understand the GPT layout, I don't see how GRUB
or LILO could overcome that to boot from such a device.

True dat. I didn't know that it was a BIOS thing, thanks.

.

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