Re: rawhide net install image doesn't work with bios partitions

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On Mon, 27 May 2019 12:04:58 -0600
Chris Murphy <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 11:27 AM stan <upaitag@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Yes, the firmware is UEFI.  But, the hard drives have been in use
> > with older hardware that wasn't.  My understanding is that it is
> > difficult and chancy to convert from legacy partitions to GPT
> > partitioning.  Is that false?  
> 
> It should be possible.
> 
> # fdisk -l /dev/
> 
> ideally the first partition starts at LBA 2048. If not...well cross
> that bridge later.
> 
> Next run gdisk on this device. It will read the MBR, create a GPT from
> it in memory, and you can write out GPT to disk with the 'w' command.
> That's it. You need free space on that drive for the installer to
> create an EFI System partition, which contains bootloader stuff rather
> than the MBR gap.
> 
> Per the UEFI spec, this should not be necessary, but due to past
> experience with bugs, I would probably opt for zeroing the first 440
> bytes of LBA 0 on this drive, which is where the stage 1 (BIOS) GRUB
> bootloader is located. On UEFI all the GRUB stuff is on the EFI System
> volume.
> 
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/becareful bs=1 count=440

It seems that the above won't be necessary, as I must have originally
formatted the drive as GPT, and forgotten I'd done so.

I was able to switch the firmware to strictly BIOS from UEFI/BIOS
hybrid, with UEFI preferred.  That allowed the installer to proceed.
Unfortunately, it hung while trying to write an mbr, though everything
else worked; it installed software, I was able to set users and
passwords. I suspect that is because the disk I was installing to is
actually formatted with GPT, since it is larger than 2 TiB.  It ran for
over 20 minutes at almost 100% CPU and didn't complete.  So, I killed
it.  But it had somehow altered something so that when I tried to boot
to the other Fedora installed on that disk, it immediately dropped to a
grub prompt. It was trying to validate partitions with os-prober at the
time I killed it, according to the log, and had hung on the existing
Fedora root partition. When I booted in rescue and looked at the disk
with fdisk, it declared that all the other partitions on the disk
except the ones I had tried to install to were Microsoft data format.
That gave me a scare, until I noticed that there was no logical
partition. Fortunately I had an older Fedora on another disk that is
actually BIOS, and when I booted that from the firmware, I was able to
boot and run it.  I then ran a mkconfig there, and the os-prober found
the original Fedora on the other disk, and created boot stanzas for
it.  So I was able to get back to my Fedora, the version I am writing
this from, in a roundabout way.

The issue seems to be that hybrid installs are not allowed.  If I
install as BIOS, then I have to use BIOS partitioning, not gpt.  And, if
I install as UEFI, for some reason it doesn't accept the existing ext4
partitions on the gpt formatted drive.  Is must be possible to boot a
GPT drive from a BIOS mbr because it appears that I was doing that.
Or, did the hybrid UEFI/BIOS firmware setting allow both?

Here's the partition table for the disk from gdisk -l.

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1         2097152         4194303   1024.0 MiB  8300  
   2         4194304         6291455   1024.0 MiB  0700  
   3         6291456        48234495   20.0 GiB    8200  
   4        48234496       572522495   250.0 GiB   8300  
   5       572522496      1096810495   250.0 GiB   0700  
   6      1096810496      5860532223   2.2 TiB     0700  
   7            2048            6143   2.0 MiB     EF02

The first two partitions are boot, then swap, then two root partitions,
then data.  The code for the partitions I was trying to install from
the iso to are now 8300, the existing Fedora is 0700. 

Can I actually somehow do a UEFI install to this disk, preserving the
existing Fedora and being able to boot to it directly? 

> > I thought that I had done a direct install for Fedora 21.  It was
> > the last time that the BFO option worked for direct install from
> > the net instead of using media.  
> 
> This?
> https://boot.fedoraproject.org/download
> 
> That's definitely BIOS only. In theory it could be dual UEFI and BIOS,
> but no one's done that work and testing. The image would be much
> bigger. The ones on that page are ~1MiB. I casually estimate a dual
> UEFI + BIOS image would be ~10MiB.

Yes, that's the one.  The lkrn file that downloads the rest of the
boot from the net is ~300kB, but that doesn't actually boot the
computer, only downloads the next stage.  Just a bootstrap.  The actual
boot first stage is approximately 30 MiB, if my memory is accurate
after all this time. I remember it printing several lines of markers to
show its progress. That then downloads anaconda for the actual install,
and it proceeds just like a netinstall from that point.
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