[Liverpool] Possible topic for future talk

[David Hughes]

On 24 October 2012 12:16, Sebastian Arcus <shop at open-t.co.uk> wrote:
> I know I'm going to regret this when I'll realise later on what I've done,
> but here it goes :-)
>
> I'm in the process (read: struggling, cursing and pulling hair out) of
> installing Linux on a new machine which only supports UEFI (the replacement
> for BIOS) and GPT (the replacement for MBR). Now maybe others using more
> sleek distro's than me ;-) will have a bit less of a hassle - but it
> occurred to me that a talk on some of the workings of UEFI, GPT and how it
> might affect installing Linux could be an interesting topic for those who
> haven't dealt with this hurdle yet. Any takers?
>
> Now quick, press the send button before I realise what I'm getting myself
> into and change my mind :-)

Just out of interest, which distro are you using? It sounds like an
interesting topic.
A while ago I experienced what I would characterise as the inverse of
your problem: FreeBSD 9's installer now defaults to installing the
operating system using a GPT partitioning scheme, and I was installing
it on an older machine whose BIOS didn't understand GPT at all.
Unfortunately there was no warning given that they had changed the
default partitioning scheme and that it was possible that it might not
work with older hardware, so I just selected the default options. The
installation completed without incident, but on rebooting the machine,
as far as the computer's BIOS was concerned, the drive was dead.

At first I assumed that I'd just been unlucky and that it had died of
natural causes, but I discovered that some people on the FreeBSD
mailing list had had exactly the same problem. I had to unplug the
drive, boot the computer from a live CD and then plug the drive back
in order to change it back to a partitioning scheme that the BIOS
could handle.