From: Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Big USB disks
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2020 10:32:27 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAGfcS_kdOUoJ5XL-9LnQegUm5H75k91v8YZC0KPHt4q8Tzfk-Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <5420897.DvuYhMxLoT@peak>
On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 7:58 AM Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Just a quickie - is there a way to enable a machine built on an MSDOS BIOS to
> recognise a partition on a 4TB external disk? I think I know the answer
> already, but just in case...
I suspect most newer firmwares are fine with it (even in legacy mode),
and ancient ones would need a firmware update, so good luck with that.
You might be able to mitigate the issue with a boot partition close to
the start of the disk. I'm honestly not sure if that works with
something like a USB hard drive. I'm not sure how old this system is
either.
Back in the day MBR patches for large disks were a pretty common
thing. I'm not sure how much any modern OS depends on the firmware to
do disk IO once it is booted, and I'm not sure that most bootloaders
even need help from the firmware beyond maybe whatever goes in the
boot sector. This is why some GRUB modes require a secondary
partition near the start of the disk to handle certain
filesystems/etc. (Or at least used to - GRUB and EFI have gotten so
good that I don't pay much attention to that stuff on newer hardware
and with common filesystems, even including ZFS.)
Rich
--
Rich
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-12-22 15:32 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-12-22 12:58 [gentoo-user] Big USB disks Peter Humphrey
2020-12-22 15:32 ` Rich Freeman [this message]
2020-12-22 16:36 ` Peter Humphrey
2020-12-22 16:48 ` Rich Freeman
2020-12-22 18:11 ` Peter Humphrey
2020-12-23 9:54 ` [gentoo-user] " Nikos Chantziaras
2020-12-23 18:25 ` Peter Humphrey
2020-12-23 18:56 ` Mark Knecht
2020-12-23 19:25 ` Michael
2020-12-24 9:29 ` Peter Humphrey
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