On 03/10/2010 02:46 AM, Johannes Stezenbach wrote:
On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 04:32:04PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
It can. The BIOS doesn't care about the partition table at all --
all it does is load the MBR.
A little story for your entertainment pleasure:
I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H board, and during install
turned off the power after partitioning but before formatting
any partition because I got distracted by something else.
Result: System could not boot anymore, BIOS hung before
I could get to the "select boot device" screen. This also
happened when I removed the hdd from the boot device
list in BIOS. The last BIOS message was "Verifying DMI Pool Data"
and you can find numerous similar reports by searching for
'gigabyte bios hang "Verifying DMI Pool Data"'.
In my case it worked to switch the SATA mode from AHCI to
something else, then wipe the partition table and switch
back to AHCI. But I read on the net that some people had
to format the drive in another PC, or hotplug it after the BIOS
got past "Verifying DMI Pool Data".
Well, yes, there are buggy BIOSes of a gazillion varieties. A fair
number of them read the partition table to try to guess what C/H/S
geometry the user intended. However, the GPT spec specifically uses a
"Protective MBR" to guard against this and other issues like it; it
makes the entire disk look to MBR-reading software like a single fully
partitioned disk with one large partition on it.
-hpa
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