[Gllug] Fdisk in a pure Linux environment

[David L Neil]

John,

On 01/06/2012 08:11 PM, John Winters wrote:
> On 30/11/11 12:12, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:05:50AM +0000, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
>>> I think this is 32 or 64 sectors. fdisk will probably do that for you,
>>
>> First of all, forget about fdisk. Don't use it. Parted is also
>> horrible[1], but at least it can handle GPT, which is the future of
>> partitioning once> 2TB disks become common.
>
> One thing to be aware of (which caught me out the first time I tried) is
> that if you have a large (>= 2TB) drive which you intend to use for
> booting Linux with grub then you must create a small partition of type
> "bios_grub" at the beginning of the disk or else grub won't be able to
> install itself.
>
> The Debian installer at least makes no complaint if you fail to do this,
> and you only find out at the grub installation stage which is very
> irritating.

The Fedora 16 documentation discusses this point.
(sorry, I'm guessing that's not so easy to Apt-get?)

However the mass of choices between smaller and larger drives, BIOS and 
UEFI, GRUB and GRUB2, makes life rather complicated and it's not always 
easy to determine which path to follow. Perhaps it would be easier if 
there was a tool which listed the valid choices for the particular 
hardware and highlighted a recommendation?

When I installed Fred's live-CD onto two year old h/w with total freedom 
to wipe the entire drive and partition itself, the installed system 
wouldn't boot beyond the BIOS. System Rescue to the rescue: I 
re-partitioned the drive, and then re-installed as if over the top of an 
"existing Linux system". They don't mention that in the manual(s) - and 
I doubt that my finished result is entirely optimal, but maybe that's 
just a glass half-full thinking...

Incidentally those same (Fedora 16) manuals do indeed talk about primary 
partitions and the boot flag...

-- 
Regards,
=dn
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