Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2023-10-18, Michael <confabul...@kintzios.com> wrote: > >>> Oh, and if you use GPT, you no longer need the MBR compatibility >>> partition, or whatever its called. I no longer need it so I can't >>> remember the exact name. >> Man pages of partitioning tools refer to it as "Protective MBR", although >> I've >> seen it mentioned in the interwebs as "protective GPT", which I think is >> more >> accurate. It uses the first sector (LBA 0) to store an MBR table showing >> the >> whole disk, or 2TB if smaller, as an MBR partition. This is the first >> partition on the disk, typically 1 MiB in size. It is meant to stop 20 year >> old partitioning tools from messing up a GPT partitioning scheme because >> they >> can't see it. Arguably nobody uses Windows 98 these days, so it should be >> safe to not have a protective MBR on your GPT disks. > The protective MBR and the BIOS boot partition are two different, > unrelated things. The BIOS boot partition is a real partition (usually > 1-2MB in size) that's present in the GPT parition table. It's used by > Grub as a place to store its files. It must be the first partition, > and it doesn't have a real filesystem (grub uses some sort of private > filesystem): > > $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1 > Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 465.76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors > Disk model: Samsung SSD 980 PRO 500GB > Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes > Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes > I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes > Disklabel type: gpt > Disk identifier: E81DD16A-A5AE-3C4A-AD3C-26DF2985827A > > Device Start End Sectors Size Type > /dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 6143 4096 2M BIOS boot > /dev/nvme0n1p2 6144 134219775 134213632 64G Linux filesystem > /dev/nvme0n1p3 134219776 976773134 842553359 401.8G Linux filesystem > > > > >
I usually use cgdisk, or cfdisk, but they all do the same thing. Just a different interface. As long as all this is documented, I'll just follow it and it should work. After all, efi has been around for a long while now. I'm sure millions of people have it installed, likely billions. I do wonder, can one still put things like memtest, Knoppix and such in that thing? I'm sure it can be done but never seen it mentioned. I started to put it on the old 770T but didn't now that I have that Ventoy USB thing. It's going to be a while before I have to do this. I still haven't found a mobo. Not one I really like anyway. Dale :-) :-)
