On 2007-02-02, Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 09:05:06AM -0200, Otavio Salvador wrote: >> I've received a bug report[1] with an interesting patch on GRUB. This >> patch adds support to GPT on it. > >> 1. http://bugs.debian.org/407338 > >> That would be great since it makes the Appled based Intel machines >> much simple to install and since the patch isn't too invasive I would >> like to get it in. > >> Please check the bug report and post your complains ;-)
I have also run into this bug independently on several storage servers with >2 TB of space recently. I applied Marco Gerards' patch[0] to the grub 0.97-22 package (it applied cleanly) and built a "grub-gpt"[1] package. This patch worked for me with a GPT partition table on i386 and amd64. Using the etch rc1 installer, simply chrooting into /target and installing this patched package, running update-grub and grub-install and selecting "continue without a boot loader" were sufficient to boot a newly installed system successfully. Marco notes in [0] that his patch will not be included in grub 'legacy', as upstream is in feature freeze; the last release was made nearly two years ago. However, he adds "but I hope this will be useful for at least some people or distributions." Other workarounds for the lack of GPT support include connecting a small IDE flash module to the motherboard for the /boot filesystem, a technique I employed up until today when I ran out of them; placing another disk in the system for /boot, which unfortunately wouldn't be protected from failure by RAID; enabling "LUN carving" if your controller supports it, which has additional downsides (e.g., employing LVM to stitch the space back together). > The bug report claims: > >> GRUB is currently the only bootloader which is able to >> boot from GPT partitions which are mandatory when partitioning >> blockdevices which exceed 2TB in size (and become more and more common >> due to the latest developments in the storage sector). > > Isn't elilo also able to boot from GPT partitions? Description: Bootloader for systems using EFI-based firmware This is the Linux bootloader for systems using the Intel EFI firmware specification. This includes all ia64 systems, and some ia32 systems. elilo is not available on the amd64 platform, and furthermore a grub which supports gpt is useful even on systems with a conventional non-EFI BIOS. 4-port and 8-port RAID controllers are commonly available which can be used on these platforms to create >2 TB RAID devices with 750 GB or 500 GB SATA drives. It is important to note that the use of GPT is not limited to EFI hardware. GPT can provide benefits over msdos partition tables on standard i386/amd64 hardware. partman will automatically select the gpt table format if a block device larger than 2 TB is partitioned, but if /boot is on this block device grub cannot be installed. I am unsure if the standard lilo in etch can boot off these devices, but lilo is an enormous backwards step in features from grub. Robert Millan suggests the use of grub2 in #407338, but it seems this package is marked "[EXPERIMENTAL]" in the short description and is not available in testing. [0] http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-grub@gnu.org/msg10632.html [1] http://debian.gtisc.gatech.edu/packages/grub-gpt/grub_0.97-22~rse0.dsc -- Robert Edmonds [EMAIL PROTECTED]
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
