Am Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:06:45 -0700 schrieb "John T. Wilkinson"<john.t.wilkinson@dartmouth.edu>:
I believe this is accurate. I have used GPT for large raid arrays on other Linux distros. The prevailing way to deal with GPT is to leave it out of the installer, configure the OS on a non GPT partition, then after install to use parted to make the GPT partitions. I believe to boot to a GPT partition you need EFI or UEFI, booting to GPT from a regular bios is not well supported, and most motherboards presently do not have EFI/UEFI except for some enterprise servers. Not quite right as far as I know. It was primarily intended for EFI/UEFI, but now runs with BIOS, too. I know there have been attempts to patch grub to work with GPT, and grub 2 is supposed to include support, but I think there are still issues and
But first installing a system and then make GPT partitions wouldn't make much sense particularly if you need to install the system onto a partition bigger than 2 TB even if this partition only contains /home.
A good first step that would put Arch beyond other distros from what I've seen would be support for non-boot GPT partitions in the installer via parted. There should not only non-boot GPT partitions. It should be possible to be able to building the whole partitioning scheme as GPT.
I don't know if it would be possible to mix MBR and GPT partitions anyway.
Heiko This is how things are often done on servers with a lot of storage, I've done it multiple times myself with large raid arrays: setup a small disk to hold the OS and boot from using an MBR during install, then after install, setup a larger disk (or more often RAID array) using GPT
On 12/07/2010 12:06 PM, Heiko Baums wrote: this does not always work (see http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/bios.html for example), hence my statement that booting from GPT with a bios is not "well supported" currently. that is used for data. -JT