On Thu, 2011-08-25 at 16:17 -0600, Andrew McNabb wrote: > While installing Fedora 16 Alpha, I ran into some problems that turned > out to be caused by the installer formatting with a GPT rather than an > MBR partition table. > > I would like to understand the change and its implications, and I have > unsuccessfully tried to track down more information. I haven't been > able to find anything in the Fedora 16 Alpha Release Notes or the Grub2 > feature page. The only definitive reference I've been able to find is > the comment "x86 uses GPT disklabels by default on all machines, even > non-EFI" on the Anaconda/Changes wiki page. > > There seem to be some complications associated with the change. For > example, Windows can only support GPT on UEFI machines, so dual-booting > appears to be unsupported (I could not find an option for MBR partition > tables in the installer). > > Where should I look for more information? Thanks. To boot to a GPT disk from BIOS (rather than EFI) you need a BIOS boot partition. If you use one of the automatic partitioning methods, rather than manual partitioning, F16's installer will create one for you. If you choose manual partitioning on a BIOS system and don't create a BIOS boot partition, anaconda will pop up a (somewhat cryptic) warning. If you're installing alongside an existing copy of Windows I believe anaconda ought to leave the disk label alone (MSDOS) anyway, though I'm not sure we've tested that. It should only write a new one if you're blowing away any existing partitions on the disk, I think. (IMBW on this one). -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
