I stripped a WD 500 GB green drive from a PVR. Thence put I it
into a PC and did attempt to install a penguin O/S thereon.
And lo, it did protest that this mainboard can not boot from a
GPT disk. Well I wiped the first track and started again, but I
wonder why is it so?
I have pulled disks from other PVRs that were security freeze
locked. Is it just some cuntery to impede users from upgrading
to a bigger disk?

Nomen Nescio <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote

> I stripped a WD 500 GB green drive from a PVR. Thence put I it
> into a PC and did attempt to install a penguin O/S thereon.
> And lo, it did protest that this mainboard can not boot from a
> GPT disk. Well I wiped the first track and started again, but I
> wonder why is it so?

Basically the boot is done differently with those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Pa...support_of_GPT

> I have pulled disks from other PVRs that were security freeze
> locked. Is it just some cuntery to impede users from upgrading
> to a bigger disk?

Nope, it’s a different ways of doing the boot phase.

In the last episode of <(E-Mail Removed)>,
Nomen Nescio <(E-Mail Removed)> said:

>I stripped a WD 500 GB green drive from a PVR. Thence put I it
>into a PC and did attempt to install a penguin O/S thereon.
>And lo, it did protest that this mainboard can not boot from a
>GPT disk. Well I wiped the first track and started again, but I
>wonder why is it so?
>I have pulled disks from other PVRs that were security freeze
>locked. Is it just some cuntery to impede users from upgrading
>to a bigger disk?

If I had to guess, it's because the PVR supports (or might one day
support) larger than 2TB drives and they didn't want to deal with
changing and supporting multiple formats later.

There's really nothing wrong with using MBR if you know your drives
won't expand and are under the 2TB limit (RAID arrays often appear as
one physical disk to the OS, but may expand their capacity later), but
when you're designing the hardware and software, there's no need to be
stuck with MBR either.

--
This signature was randomly selected

David Brown <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> On 16/06/12 07:01, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>> I stripped a WD 500 GB green drive from a PVR. Thence put I it
>> into a PC and did attempt to install a penguin O/S thereon.
>> And lo, it did protest that this mainboard can not boot from a
>> GPT disk. Well I wiped the first track and started again, but I
>> wonder why is it so?
>> I have pulled disks from other PVRs that were security freeze
>> locked. Is it just some cuntery to impede users from upgrading
>> to a bigger disk?
>>

> If you are reusing the disk, you can just put an MBR partition table on
> it instead (any disk partitioning program will do that for you).

> I wonder how the Linux installation figures out that your mainboard (or,
> more accurately, your bios) can't boot from a GPT disk.

I suspect there is some sys-call that needs to be present in the
BIOS but is missing. If this was GRUB2 as bootloader, then there
should be something in its documentaton about this.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: (E-Mail Removed)
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

On 17/06/2012 12:00 AM, DevilsPGD wrote:
> If I had to guess, it's because the PVR supports (or might one day
> support) larger than 2TB drives and they didn't want to deal with
> changing and supporting multiple formats later.
>
> There's really nothing wrong with using MBR if you know your drives
> won't expand and are under the 2TB limit (RAID arrays often appear as
> one physical disk to the OS, but may expand their capacity later), but
> when you're designing the hardware and software, there's no need to be
> stuck with MBR either.

Will USB-based disks work if they are formatted in GPT? I don't mean for
booting, just for storage.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> On 17/06/2012 12:00 AM, DevilsPGD wrote:
>> If I had to guess, it's because the PVR supports (or might one day
>> support) larger than 2TB drives and they didn't want to deal with
>> changing and supporting multiple formats later.
>>
>> There's really nothing wrong with using MBR if you know your drives
>> won't expand and are under the 2TB limit (RAID arrays often appear as
>> one physical disk to the OS, but may expand their capacity later), but
>> when you're designing the hardware and software, there's no need to be
>> stuck with MBR either.

> Will USB-based disks work if they are formatted in GPT? I don't mean for
> booting, just for storage.

As USB is translated to SCSI, it should not make that much
of a difference.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: (E-Mail Removed)
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans