[arch-releng] GPT support in AIF

[Heiko Baums]

Am Tue, 7 Dec 2010 18:54:29 +0100
schrieb Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be>:

> I'm not very familiar with this topic.
> Nor am i familiar with the related topic of block boundary sizes and
> stuff.
> Although tpowa tried to explain to me, this is what I wrote down:
> 
> * don't use sfdisk or cfdisk, they don't support 1MB bootsectors
> (which is a new standard for 4k sector drives, better alignment and
> win7)
> * parted and fdisk do.
> * mbr is soon dead
> * https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_4_KiB_sector_issues 
> * parted is also good for GPT and uefi usage
> * fdisk does not support GPT
> * but parted has no (ncurses) UI
> 
> so yeah, lets figure out if this info is still up to date, and how we
> should proceed. it looks like we shoud just use parted, if we can
> find/make an ncurses frontend for it, all problems should be magically
> solved.

I'm not familiar with GPT, too. I got to know it at FrOSCon 2010 at the
FreeBSD booth. Nevertheless it looked quite interesting and is
necessary for partitions bigger than 2 TB.

I don't know its usability, but there's a CLI tool for GPT:
gdisk resp. GPT fdisk
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/index.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/

It's already in [extra] and on the LiveCDs Parted Magic
(http://partedmagic.com) and SystemRescueCD (http://www.sysresccd.org).

Parted has no ncurses GUI but can be used from the command line.

I'll search for GPT tools again later.

Heiko