On 2020-12-23 11:29, James Cook wrote: > On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 10:21:08AM -0500, Nick Holland wrote: >> On 2020-12-22 23:58, Allan Streib wrote: >> > Duncan Patton a Campbell <[email protected]> writes: >> > >> >> fdisk seems unwilling to allow more than 2T in the partition: >> > >> > Look at the b command for disklabel(8) to set the OpenBSD disk >> > boundaries. >> > >> > Allan >> > >> >> yep. >> fdisk can't do bigger than 2T because that's as big as the MBR tables >> allow. But fdisk is only used to mark off the OpenBSD part of the disk >> to keep other OSes from stomping on its space. If you are running an >> exclusively OpenBSD system or otherwise keep the OSes from getting >> confused, fdisk isn't used for much. Make it as big as you can, and >> you are fine. >> >> disklabel, by default, only uses the OpenBSD fdisk partition, but you >> can blow through that barrier with the 'b' command, as Allan indicated. >> >> If you are using softraid, you will have to repeat the disklabel 'b' >> thing for the softraid disks, too. I usually forget that part. >> >> Nick. > > If you're starting fresh, isn't it simpler to use a GPT partition > table if you want to go past that limit? >
IF your computer supports GPT, that's certainly an option. However, I've yet to find anything "simpler" about GPT setups. Whatever GPT was supposed to make better, I think they missed. (to be fair: I understand the OpenBSD MBR boot process very well, and I can fix just about anything that goes wrong with it. I have NOT figured out all of GPT booting all that well -- I can make it work, (more accurately: I can let the OpenBSD devs make it work) but I can't exactly tell you what is going on under the hood. I have got multibooting to work with GPT, and if I ever figure out all of how THAT worked, it might be a better way of doing multibooting than the usual MBR solutions.) I've never regretted setting up a MBR boot system on an "either will do" machine. I have regretted setting up a GPT system on a machine that became unreliable, and thus had to be replaced, and I spent too long trying to find a new used system that was also GPT capable. So far in my life, all my systems are MBR capable, some are also GPT capable, but until it becomes mostly GPT and few MBR, I'm kinda fond of the MBR setup for failure recovery reasons. And really, the key sequence of "b" [enter] "*" [enter] is NOT a major difficulty (other than remembering to do it. Somehow, I keep building systems where it is stupidly easy to forget, though that's also an easy after-the-fact fix). Yes, there are some GPT only computers now. There are some dual mode with buggy MBR support. I'm pretty sure there are some dual mode machines with buggy GPT support. I do not think there's a universal answer -- look at your situation and knowledge and proceed appropriately. Nick.
