[arch-general] fdisk vs. gdisk for GPT partitioning

[Eli Schwartz]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Bardur Arantsson <spam at scientician.net>
wrote:

>
> Speaking from complete ignorance... do significant numbers of people
> still use MBR for non-obsolete platforms/machines?
>
> Regards,
>

My laptop is the ~10 years old Dell Inspiron B130.

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Bardur Arantsson <spam at scientician.net>
wrote:

> I'm not sure why you put "obsolete" in quotation marks...? I have a
> machine from ~5 years ago that has no problem with GPT. I certainly
> understand that we should strive to support old hardware and such *as
> long as it makes sense effort-wise*, but perhaps the Beginner's Guide is
> not the place to do that? (Beginners are perhaps likely to have
> reasonably up-to-date hardware, etc. etc.)
>
> Regards,
>

Where is your data for that assumption? :p

My first foray into ArchLinux was installing it to said laptop ^^ so I at
least was a beginner with fairly obsolete hardware.


In any event, I decided to keep the Windows (XP) partition -- no point in
tossing a working OS, and I need it for a program or two that runs on XP
but not WINE.
So I *had* to use MBR, as XP does not support GPT. And most likely, so will
anyone who wishes to dual-boot a computer with Win7 preinstalled (which
usually defaults to BIOS+MBR I believe), unless you want to have a lot of
fun switching it manually to UEFI+GPT, or reinstalling.


MBR

-- Eli Schwartz