[gentoo-user] Re: GPT newbee needs some help

[James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com>]

Neil Bothwick <neil <at> digimed.co.uk> writes:


> > First determine if the motherboards is a Bios or EFI variety. 
> > Then, decide which bootloader you are going to use:: grub(legacy) grub2,
> > lilo, gummi, EFI, etc etc? Last, how many different distros will you
> > ultimately be booting off that disk.

> > Then with that data, decide which formatting tool to use. (Others will
> > disagree with this logical progression, which is good as long as they
> > refine there reasons, explicitly.)

> I agree up until the last paragraph. You can use gdisk and a GPT whether
> you are using BIO or EFI. The difference is in your first partition. For
> EFI it must be type EF00 and formatted with FAT. For BIOS booting you
> need to start the disk with a small BIOS compatibility partition of type
> EF02. This is 1M here and you don't format or use it, it just has to be
> there.

I do not diagree what you are stating. I'll try it again. My logic is
hopefully sound, but might not appeal to everyone. It's what I'm working on
for my cluster/node reconfiguration tool which will eventually boot
embedded, many different arches and also use a variety of (i)PXE style node
wake-ups and fast boots with images served from servers. Hence the need for
one generic HD partition scheme:: (no raid decision tree) so drives and
systems can be moved around into a variety of test configurations as easily
as possible.

1. Is the disk a boot disk. (ignore additional disks for now. Most are 2G
sata drives.

2. (assuming yes)  Which distros will be booting off that disk.

3. Determine if the motherboards is a Bios or EFI variety.

4. Select a bootloader. (grub-1 grub-2 etc.

5. Specify the (example:boot/root/swap) partition scheme according to
previous data, ignoring other optional partitions for this example.

6. Select the partition tool.

Note:: a generic default (generic) partition scheme, shown below will work
for both Bios and EFI systems, so if a HD is moved between different mobos,
all else being same it should not have to be reformatted.

<what would that default generic partition scheme look like for just
boot, root and swap that works on both mbr(bios) and efi motherboards?>

Hopefully this makes sense, as the basis of a collection of systems to
test a variety of cluster architectures, DFS and clusters codes, on
identical  hardware to validate performance comparison....


James