On Fri, Jun 09, 2017 at 11:36:04PM -0400, fsmithred wrote: > On 06/08/2017 09:07 AM, Hendrik Boom wrote: > > > > I have a machine with both old-style MBR (fdisk) partitioned and > > gpt-style (needs gdisk) partitioned disks. It boots using grub or > > lilo. > > > > > > > How would booting from the GPT drives work? It's an old machine whose > > BIOS looks for an MBR. I may well be forced to do this is my legacy > > disk drives fail. > > > > If I were to transplant my GPT-formatted drives into a modern machine > > that expects an EFI boot, would it just work? Or would I have to do > > something major -- like repartition -- that puts my data at risk? > > > > -- hendrik > > _______________________________________________ > > > Your old machine may or may not boot from a gpt drive. It is possible to > put an mbr bootloader on a gpt drive. I've done that a couple of times, > and one of the times it (or I) messed things up and had to repartition the > drive.
There is the so-called protective MBR.. I suppose that could be the start of a boot procedure. > > To boot your gpt drives on uefi hardware, you would need an efi partition > with a bootloader. The efi partition is usually the first partition of the > first hard drive. I haven't tried putting it in a different location. An > easy solution would be to add a hard drive (or even a usb) and install > enough of a system to use it to boot and add your existing system to the > boot menu. I have a old laptop with an EFI partition, but it has the old-style MBR partitioning structure. The EFI partition was there when it was new, together with a Windows XP system (which is no longer there). As far as I've been able to tell, the contents of that partition is garbage. It wasn't even a valid FAT-style file system, as is (or used to be?) required by specs. > > Read this before you play with uefi - > http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html That looks like a very useful set of pages. -- hendrik _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
