Out of Space

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 09 August 2016 09:58:59 Liam Proven wrote:

> On 9 August 2016 at 15:47, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > i thought that was the setup described above (grub being 850GB into
> > the 1TB disk), but i re-read again and gene was talking about /boot
> > not grub ... sorry for the confusion then, if grub sits in the MBR
> > it should surely find everything...
>
> If a large disk (terabyte+) is formatted as a single huge partition,
> then yes, 5% of it for metadata is plausible.
>
> But it's probably more normal to partition it up into smaller
> subvolumes. E.g. my Mac's external 3TB drive has Ubuntu root & home
> partitions, a Windows partition, a bootable copy of the previous
> version of Mac OS X, and then a ~2TB Time Machine partition.
>
> Yes, GRUB can be installed into the MBR (the normal way) or into a
> partition's boot sector (needs `` -- force '' & it complains, but it
> works).
>
> The only issue I see here is that terabyte-sized drives are usually
> partitioned with GPT, not MBR. With GPT there is no MBR present.
> However, GPT disks are only bootable on UEFI machines. With UEFI, a
> boot disk must have a ~100MB FAT32 system partition, and as I
> understand it, GRUB goes in there, not in the disk's boot sector or in
> the root partition's boot sector.

Following along with this thread while catching up on the yard work, I am 
reading some disturbing info that I don't believe has been discussed.

What I am reading, is that since these motherboards are old enough that 
every partion in my system is an MBR partition. They have no knowledge 
of this UEFI thing.  And from that you are telling me such a thing as 
this GPT is rather worthless to me. Your gdisk utility, if ran with 
fdisk syntax, reports it finds valid MBR on both of the terabyte drives 
currently in this machine, and says it will convert it to GPT as the 
next operation. Since from what I've read here, that would be a 
disastrous thing, I obviously typed a 'q'enter.

I've not yet installed the next drive so I'll have a playground. But if I 
can't use a GPT partitioned drive anyway, please tell me why I should 
bother?

MBR works fine on a terabyte drive, I've done it 5 or 6 times already. 
The only PITA is trying to get the partitions aligned correctly on a 
4k/sector drive, which 1 or 2, probably 3 when I hook the cables up to 
this new drive. So far as I know, which is a little 'dated', none of the 
partitioner's we have looks at your choices, and slightly adjusts the 
MBR settings, either automatically, or by calling the speed killing 
error to your attention.  Or have they now silently grown this ability?

This next drive WILL have to be a bootable (as /dev/sda) drive at some 
point.  That is not optional.  And none of these MB's knows what UEFI 
is.

> --
> Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>