On Mon, 27 May 2019 12:04:58 -0600 Chris Murphy <li...@colorremedies.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 11:27 AM stan <upai...@zoho.com> wrote: > > > > Yes, the firmware is UEFI. But, the hard drives have been in use > > with older hardware that wasn't. My understanding is that it is > > difficult and chancy to convert from legacy partitions to GPT > > partitioning. Is that false? > > It should be possible. > > # fdisk -l /dev/ > > ideally the first partition starts at LBA 2048. If not...well cross > that bridge later. > > Next run gdisk on this device. It will read the MBR, create a GPT from > it in memory, and you can write out GPT to disk with the 'w' command. > That's it. You need free space on that drive for the installer to > create an EFI System partition, which contains bootloader stuff rather > than the MBR gap. > > Per the UEFI spec, this should not be necessary, but due to past > experience with bugs, I would probably opt for zeroing the first 440 > bytes of LBA 0 on this drive, which is where the stage 1 (BIOS) GRUB > bootloader is located. On UEFI all the GRUB stuff is on the EFI System > volume. > > # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/becareful bs=1 count=440 It seems that the above won't be necessary, as I must have originally formatted the drive as GPT, and forgotten I'd done so. I was able to switch the firmware to strictly BIOS from UEFI/BIOS hybrid, with UEFI preferred. That allowed the installer to proceed. Unfortunately, it hung while trying to write an mbr, though everything else worked; it installed software, I was able to set users and passwords. I suspect that is because the disk I was installing to is actually formatted with GPT, since it is larger than 2 TiB. It ran for over 20 minutes at almost 100% CPU and didn't complete. So, I killed it. But it had somehow altered something so that when I tried to boot to the other Fedora installed on that disk, it immediately dropped to a grub prompt. It was trying to validate partitions with os-prober at the time I killed it, according to the log, and had hung on the existing Fedora root partition. When I booted in rescue and looked at the disk with fdisk, it declared that all the other partitions on the disk except the ones I had tried to install to were Microsoft data format. That gave me a scare, until I noticed that there was no logical partition. Fortunately I had an older Fedora on another disk that is actually BIOS, and when I booted that from the firmware, I was able to boot and run it. I then ran a mkconfig there, and the os-prober found the original Fedora on the other disk, and created boot stanzas for it. So I was able to get back to my Fedora, the version I am writing this from, in a roundabout way. The issue seems to be that hybrid installs are not allowed. If I install as BIOS, then I have to use BIOS partitioning, not gpt. And, if I install as UEFI, for some reason it doesn't accept the existing ext4 partitions on the gpt formatted drive. Is must be possible to boot a GPT drive from a BIOS mbr because it appears that I was doing that. Or, did the hybrid UEFI/BIOS firmware setting allow both? Here's the partition table for the disk from gdisk -l. Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 2097152 4194303 1024.0 MiB 8300 2 4194304 6291455 1024.0 MiB 0700 3 6291456 48234495 20.0 GiB 8200 4 48234496 572522495 250.0 GiB 8300 5 572522496 1096810495 250.0 GiB 0700 6 1096810496 5860532223 2.2 TiB 0700 7 2048 6143 2.0 MiB EF02 The first two partitions are boot, then swap, then two root partitions, then data. The code for the partitions I was trying to install from the iso to are now 8300, the existing Fedora is 0700. Can I actually somehow do a UEFI install to this disk, preserving the existing Fedora and being able to boot to it directly? > > I thought that I had done a direct install for Fedora 21. It was > > the last time that the BFO option worked for direct install from > > the net instead of using media. > > This? > https://boot.fedoraproject.org/download > > That's definitely BIOS only. In theory it could be dual UEFI and BIOS, > but no one's done that work and testing. The image would be much > bigger. The ones on that page are ~1MiB. I casually estimate a dual > UEFI + BIOS image would be ~10MiB. Yes, that's the one. The lkrn file that downloads the rest of the boot from the net is ~300kB, but that doesn't actually boot the computer, only downloads the next stage. Just a bootstrap. The actual boot first stage is approximately 30 MiB, if my memory is accurate after all this time. I remember it printing several lines of markers to show its progress. That then downloads anaconda for the actual install, and it proceeds just like a netinstall from that point. _______________________________________________ test mailing list -- test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to test-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test@lists.fedoraproject.org
