On Thu, 2011-08-25 at 16:17 -0600, Andrew McNabb wrote:
While installing Fedora 16 Alpha, I ran into some problems that
turned
out to be caused by the installer formatting with a GPT rather than an
MBR partition table.
I would like to understand the change and its implications, and I have
unsuccessfully tried to track down more information. I haven't been
able to find anything in the Fedora 16 Alpha Release Notes or the Grub2
feature page. The only definitive reference I've been able to find is
the comment "x86 uses GPT disklabels by default on all machines, even
non-EFI" on the Anaconda/Changes wiki page.
There seem to be some complications associated with the change. For
example, Windows can only support GPT on UEFI machines, so dual-booting
appears to be unsupported (I could not find an option for MBR partition
tables in the installer).
Where should I look for more information? Thanks.
To boot to a GPT disk from BIOS (rather than EFI) you need a BIOS boot
partition. If you use one of the automatic partitioning methods, rather
than manual partitioning, F16's installer will create one for you. If
you choose manual partitioning on a BIOS system and don't create a BIOS
boot partition, anaconda will pop up a (somewhat cryptic) warning.
If you're installing alongside an existing copy of Windows I believe
anaconda ought to leave the disk label alone (MSDOS) anyway, though I'm
not sure we've tested that. It should only write a new one if you're
blowing away any existing partitions on the disk, I think. (IMBW on this
one).
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net