why GPT on a 500 GB disk ?eh?

[Nomen Nescio]

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?

 

[Rod Speed]

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_Partition_Table#Operating_System_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.

 

[DevilsPGD]

In the last episode of <[email protected]>,

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.

 

[Arno]

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

 

[Yousuf Khan]

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

 

[Arno]

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