On Wednesday, 29 May 2024 00:10:07 BST Wols Lists wrote: > On 28/05/2024 20:51, Jude DaShiell wrote: > > My machine has protected mbr with gpt partitions on it. Are those kind of > > partitions hybrid? > > This is completely standard nowadays. I think the "protected MBR" just > points to the first four GPT partitions. > > This is basically down to the fact that (a) the MBR can no longer > describe a modern large disk (I'm not sure what the limit is, 2TB? > 4TB?), and also older formatting tools - if they don't see an MBR - are > known for assuming the disk is empty and trashing the start of it. Yeah > they shouldn't, but they do ... > > Cheers, > Wol
The 'protective MBR' is a partition type 0xEE starting at sector 0 and spanning the entire length of a disk (or 2TiB). Legacy partitioning tools which do not recognise GUID Partition Table structures will identify a GPT disk to have no free space left, instead of mistakenly consider it unpartitioned. A hybrid MBR is a variant of the protective MBR and it also contains up to 3 additional primary partitions occupying the same space as up to 3 GPT partitions. Older OSs which cannot boot from GPT disks should be installed there, while modern OSs will be able to use the remaining GPT partitions on the disk. Unless gdisk declares "MBR partitions" with their Status as "primary", you do not have a hybrid MBR or any primary partitions on your disk. You can check this page for more information: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hybrid_partition_table
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