I am now completing my most difficult Linux install ever. My old hard drive with / and /home and /usr/local on it has died. My new 2TB drive was formatted for GTP. The Fedora installer warned me that GTP drives requre a /boot/efi partition. Regardless of how I partitioned, the system would not boot. I converted the drive to MBR format. The best I could get was to see the available kernels. It would not boot. I got fed up and I bought another new drive, and everything installed and booted effortlessly.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Version~1.1. (Version 3.0 supports GTP) New drive: Western Digital 2000GB SATA WD2003FZEX-0. Newer drive: Seagate ``Desktop HDD'' 2TB SATA. ST2000DM001-1ER1 From fdisk, I could see that the Western Digital drive was GTP. The new Seagate drive identified itself as "dos", which means it is MBR. Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, they just stared at me. The Western Digital drive works. It just does not work as a boot drive. I now have an /archive file system. I put my install instructions up on my website in the hopes that I am helping newbies. I am trying to make sense of all this. Right now, I figure if you have an old computer with an old hard drive that works, you should be able to install Linux. If you have a new (GTP) system that works, you should be able to intall Linux on it. If you have an old clunker and the hard drive dies, look out! Is this a Seagate versus Western Digital issue, or is my WD drive flakey? Can anybody make sense of all this? I would like to write this up as a useful document. -- Howard Gibson hgib...@eol.ca jhowardgib...@gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
