I am now completing my most difficult Linux install ever. My old hard drive with / and /home and /usr/local on it has died. My new 2TB drive was formatted for GTP. The Fedora installer warned me that GTP drives requre a /boot/efi partition. Regardless of how I partitioned, the system would not boot. I converted the drive to MBR format. The best I could get was to see the available kernels. It would not boot. I got fed up and I bought another new drive, and everything installed and booted effortlessly. Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Version~1.1. (Version 3.0 supports GTP) New drive: Western Digital 2000GB SATA WD2003FZEX-0. Newer drive: Seagate ``Desktop HDD'' 2TB SATA. ST2000DM001-1ER1 From fdisk, I could see that the Western Digital drive was GTP. The new Seagate drive identified itself as "dos", which means it is MBR. Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, they just stared at me. The Western Digital drive works. It just does not work as a boot drive. I now have an /archive file system. I put my install instructions up on my website in the hopes that I am helping newbies. I am trying to make sense of all this. Right now, I figure if you have an old computer with an old hard drive that works, you should be able to install Linux. If you have a new (GTP) system that works, you should be able to intall Linux on it. If you have an old clunker and the hard drive dies, look out! Is this a Seagate versus Western Digital issue, or is my WD drive flakey? Can anybody make sense of all this? I would like to write this up as a useful document. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca jhowardgibson@gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
| From: Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> It is "GUID Partition Table" -- GPT, not GTP. Nit picky, I know, but it might affect your success googling. | Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Version~1.1. (Version 3.0 supports GTP) The right way of thinking aout it is: does the motherboard have UEFI firmware. GPT is a consequence. There are two ways of booting a PC. - old-style Master Boot Record: the BIOS loads the first sector of the drive and then jumps to it, in 8086 mode. Everything that happens from there depends on the contents of the disk, not the firmware. (Except that the BIOS supports 8086-mode calls into the BIOS routines.) - new-style UEFI booting. The firmware *does* understand the partitioning and certain filesystems, enabling it to load and run 64-bit programs, and those programs can use the UEFI-defined routines provided by the firmware. Those programs reside in an EFI System Partition Most motherboards sold as components (as opposed to coming within a computer) support both these days. So: I conclude that your MB, being Version 1.1, does NOT have UEFI. Perhaps Versions and Revisions are different things and I've got it wrong. I would have thought that a firmware update could have fixed this, but apparently not. | New drive: Western Digital 2000GB SATA WD2003FZEX-0. | Newer drive: Seagate ``Desktop HDD'' 2TB SATA. ST2000DM001-1ER1 (You had problems with the WD drive but not the Seagate.) If I remember correctly, MBR tops out at 2T. So GPT is a good choice, but not required. Then there is the issue of sector size. As drives got to this size, they started making sectors larger than 512 bytes. Or rather they made these sector sizes visible to some extent. There were a lot of games with how much they were willing to fake 512 byte sectors for the sake of old BIOSes and old OSes. The ST2000DM001-1ER1 has 4K sectors but that it will emulate 512-byte sectors. <http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/docs/manual/desktop/Barracuda%207200.14/100686584.pdf> It is not as clear what the WD drive does about sector size. <http://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771434.pdf> <https://superuser.com/questions/1021574/difference-between-wd2003fzex-and-wd2003fyps-wd-desktop-hdds> That says "Advanced Format (AF): Yes". "Advanced Format" is Western Digital's term for 4K sectors. I don't know how to get the WD to emulate 512-byte sectors so that a BIOS could boot from it. I would expect it to be able to work somehow. If you are booting from an MBR-based system, I'm pretty sure you need that 512-byte emulation. The transition to 4k sectors was a mess. The disk manufacturers tried to paper it over and just created more complexity. And they explained little, leaving us to learn from experimentation just what was going on. I've forgotten much of what I did learn. | I am now completing my most difficult Linux install ever. My old | hard drive with / and /home and /usr/local on it has died. My new 2TB | drive was formatted for GTP. The Fedora installer warned me that GTP | drives requre a /boot/efi partition. I don't think that that is the case. If you are booting using UEFI, you surely need a /boot/efi (an EFI System Partition). But your motherboard is incapable of booting with UEFI. Fedora, as far as I can tell, will only install correctly a system to boot in the same mode as the installation disk was booted. In other words, if you booted the installation disk in UEFI, it will only install a UEFI-based system. If your booted using MBR, it will only install an MBR-based system. But there are some fine points. There is a good chance that it is possible to fool the installer into doing things that are stupid. For example, I've managed to get the installer to create a second EFI System Partition on a drive, something that is technically legal but probably a big mistake (Windows does not support this and most firmware handles it badly). Fedora (and likely other distros) create GPT disks with just enough vestigial MBR bits so that they can be booted with any MBR BIOS. This is very useful since disks bigger that 2T could not otherwise be useful as boot disks on such systems. Note: these systems will not use an EFI System Partition and should not have one. Perhaps the Fedora installer knows that an MBR system cannot handle booting from 4k-sectors-only disks and flipped into a UEFI install. That would be a bug, so it is unlikely. But there are so many cases that a bug isn't impossible. Hint: don't accept the factory partitioning. Let the Fedora installer do the partitioning from scratch. GPT is quite reasonable and might well be higher-performance. Linux partitions seem to be aligned on 1MiB boundaries. This may be slightly wasteful but it assures that any alignment requirement will be met. It will leave some gaps that can be filled with second-or-later stage boot loaders (I'm being vague here so as not to be wrong). | Regardless of how I partitioned, | the system would not boot. I converted the drive to MBR format. The | best I could get was to see the available kernels. It would not boot. Do you know whether the sectors looked to be 512 bytes to the BIOS? To the Fedora installer? | I got fed up and I bought another new drive, and everything installed | and booted effortlessly. | | Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Version~1.1. (Version 3.0 supports GTP) | New drive: Western Digital 2000GB SATA WD2003FZEX-0. | Newer drive: Seagate ``Desktop HDD'' 2TB SATA. ST2000DM001-1ER1 | | From fdisk, I could see that the Western Digital drive was GTP. The | new Seagate drive identified itself as "dos", which means it is MBR. | Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is | claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older | protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, | they just stared at me. Don't accept the partitioning done by the factory. It's just one more unknown in the mix. Personally, I'd choose GPT these days. | The Western Digital drive works. It just does not work as a boot | drive. I now have an /archive file system. Sounds like a sector size problem. | I put my install instructions up on my website in the hopes that I am | helping newbies. I am trying to make sense of all this. Right now, I | figure if you have an old computer with an old hard drive that works, | you should be able to install Linux. If you have a new (GTP) system | that works, you should be able to intall Linux on it. If you have an | old clunker and the hard drive dies, look out! | | Is this a Seagate versus Western Digital issue, or is my WD drive | flakey? Can anybody make sense of all this? I would like to write this | up as a useful document. Writing this up accurately requires a lot of testing of a diverse collection of systems. Since your current setup works, I imagine you have no desire to go back and start again. Luckily this set of problems will go away as the old hardware retires. But new problems will replace them!
On 08/10/17 12:47 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
There are two ways of booting a PC.
- old-style Master Boot Record: the BIOS loads the first sector of the drive and then jumps to it, in 8086 mode. Everything that happens from there depends on the contents of the disk, not the firmware. (Except that the BIOS supports 8086-mode calls into the BIOS routines.)
- new-style UEFI booting. The firmware *does* understand the partitioning and certain filesystems, enabling it to load and run 64-bit programs, and those programs can use the UEFI-defined routines provided by the firmware. Those programs reside in an EFI System Partition
Most motherboards sold as components (as opposed to coming within a computer) support both these days. Slightly off-topic, Dave Taht pointed me to the NERF project https://schd.ws/hosted_files/ossna2017/91/Linuxcon%202017%20NERF.pdf
It's purpose is to avoid attack vectors using EFI, the management engine and system management mode. If you can boot from MBR, /do/. --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain
On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 02:13:21 -0400 William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Another benefit of MBR is you can move the harddisk to another machine and boot.
Hahahahaha. I have done that. When I bought my motherboard back in 2012, I installed it, I installed my new processor, RAM, power supply and video card, and I booted. To my amazemenet, it worked. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca jhowardgibson@gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 12:47:41 -0400 (EDT) "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
It is "GUID Partition Table" -- GPT, not GTP. Nit picky, I know, but it might affect your success googling.
Oops. My bad. It is GPT in my notes.
| Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Version~1.1. (Version 3.0 supports GTP)
The right way of thinking aout it is: does the motherboard have UEFI firmware. GPT is a consequence. ... So: I conclude that your MB, being Version 1.1, does NOT have UEFI. Perhaps Versions and Revisions are different things and I've got it wrong.
My MoBo has "Version 1.1" printed on one corner of the board. I am a mechanical designer (with training in UNIX administration). I prepare engineering drawings. I would call this a Revision. The MIL and ASME standard recommend revision letters, not numbers. Manufacturers use whatever terminology they please. Definitely, this is hardware.
I would have thought that a firmware update could have fixed this, but apparently not.
| New drive: Western Digital 2000GB SATA WD2003FZEX-0. | Newer drive: Seagate ``Desktop HDD'' 2TB SATA. ST2000DM001-1ER1
(You had problems with the WD drive but not the Seagate.)
If I remember correctly, MBR tops out at 2T. So GPT is a good choice, but not required.
Then there is the issue of sector size. As drives got to this size, they started making sectors larger than 512 bytes. Or rather they made these sector sizes visible to some extent. There were a lot of games with how much they were willing to fake 512 byte sectors for the sake of old BIOSes and old OSes.
The ST2000DM001-1ER1 has 4K sectors but that it will emulate 512-byte sectors. <http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/docs/manual/desktop/Barracuda%207200.14/100686584.pdf>
It is not as clear what the WD drive does about sector size. <http://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771434.pdf> <https://superuser.com/questions/1021574/difference-between-wd2003fzex-and-wd2003fyps-wd-desktop-hdds> That says "Advanced Format (AF): Yes". "Advanced Format" is Western Digital's term for 4K sectors.
I don't know how to get the WD to emulate 512-byte sectors so that a BIOS could boot from it. I would expect it to be able to work somehow.
If you are booting from an MBR-based system, I'm pretty sure you need that 512-byte emulation.
The transition to 4k sectors was a mess. The disk manufacturers tried to paper it over and just created more complexity. And they explained little, leaving us to learn from experimentation just what was going on. I've forgotten much of what I did learn.
| I am now completing my most difficult Linux install ever. My old | hard drive with / and /home and /usr/local on it has died. My new 2TB | drive was formatted for GTP. The Fedora installer warned me that GTP | drives requre a /boot/efi partition.
I don't think that that is the case.
If you are booting using UEFI, you surely need a /boot/efi (an EFI System Partition). But your motherboard is incapable of booting with UEFI.
I added a 4TB drive to my Fedora system a few years ago. This was and is a backup device. I do not install the OS onto it. The hardware replacement simply worked. I formatted it and mounted it. When I upgraded to a new Fedora, the install program insisted I needed a /boot/efi partition for the new GPT system. This is in spite of my old MBR system drive. I unplugged the 4TB GPT drive. I installed then I plugged it in again. Everything works fine. This may be a glitch in the Fedora install.
| Regardless of how I partitioned, | the system would not boot. I converted the drive to MBR format. The | best I could get was to see the available kernels. It would not boot.
Do you know whether the sectors looked to be 512 bytes to the BIOS? To the Fedora installer?
No I don't... [root@Rev ~]# fdisk /dev/sda <<<<< My new Seagate system drive Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0xdf4e0a6e Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1 2048 2343751679 2343749632 1.1T 83 Linux /dev/sda2 2343751680 3398438911 1054687232 502.9G 83 Linux /dev/sda3 * 3398438912 3789062143 390623232 186.3G 83 Linux /dev/sda4 3789062144 3907028991 117966848 56.3G 5 Extended /dev/sda5 3789066240 3906252799 117186560 55.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris Command (m for help): q [root@Rev ~]# fdisk /dev/sdb <<<< My newish GPT backup drive Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdb: 3.7 TiB, 4000787030016 bytes, 7814037168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disklabel type: gpt Disk identifier: A6FA1960-3E6A-4C79-81F7-0C7354E0DC5E Device Start End Sectors Size Type /dev/sdb1 2048 7814037134 7814035087 3.7T Linux filesystem Command (m for help): q [root@Rev ~]# fdisk /dev/sdc <<<<< My new ex-system now archive drive Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdc: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x9cf133fe Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdc1 2048 3906250751 3906248704 1.8T 83 Linux Command (m for help): q The Disklabel type was GPT, but I reformatted it using dgisk.
| I got fed up and I bought another new drive, and everything installed | and booted effortlessly. | | Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Version~1.1. (Version 3.0 supports GTP) | New drive: Western Digital 2000GB SATA WD2003FZEX-0. | Newer drive: Seagate ``Desktop HDD'' 2TB SATA. ST2000DM001-1ER1 | | From fdisk, I could see that the Western Digital drive was GTP. The | new Seagate drive identified itself as "dos", which means it is MBR. | Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is | claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older | protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, | they just stared at me.
Don't accept the partitioning done by the factory. It's just one more unknown in the mix.
Personally, I'd choose GPT these days.
| The Western Digital drive works. It just does not work as a boot | drive. I now have an /archive file system.
Sounds like a sector size problem.
| I put my install instructions up on my website in the hopes that I am | helping newbies. I am trying to make sense of all this. Right now, I | figure if you have an old computer with an old hard drive that works, | you should be able to install Linux. If you have a new (GTP) system | that works, you should be able to intall Linux on it. If you have an | old clunker and the hard drive dies, look out! | | Is this a Seagate versus Western Digital issue, or is my WD drive | flakey? Can anybody make sense of all this? I would like to write this | up as a useful document.
Writing this up accurately requires a lot of testing of a diverse collection of systems.
Since your current setup works, I imagine you have no desire to go back and start again.
Nooooo.
Luckily this set of problems will go away as the old hardware retires. But new problems will replace them!
My motherboard is five years old. One of the things Linux is supposed to do is work on old computers. Mine still is reasonably new. It sounds like people running old computers need to by hard drives from second hand stores. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca jhowardgibson@gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 12:43 PM, Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
My motherboard is five years old. One of the things Linux is supposed to do is work on old computers. Mine still is reasonably new. It sounds like people running old computers need to by hard drives from second hand stores.
The motherboard in my machine is now eight years old. I have an 8TB drive connected to it, though it is not the boot device. I use a 120GB SSD for a boot device. All partitions are GPT and I'm running Fedora 26. The BIOS is old enough that it doesn't support UEFI. I do not have to buy drives from second hand stores. I don't think it's good practice to have everything on one physical device anyway because that makes upgrades/reinstalls potentially more dangerous. I've updated Fedora in-place for the last few releases but if I ever had to do a fresh install, I could do so easily without any risk of making a mistake that would clobber data on the partition that I use for /home or the installer having a bug that mucks up the partition table. Before I do a fresh install, I make a backup of fstab, and unplug the physical devices that I don't want the installer touching from the motherboard so that the installer can't even see them. I install on the boot device, turn the machine off when it has finished, reconnect the other drives, and after booting the new OS, modify fstab to mount the partitions that were offline in the appropriate places using the UUIDs for the partitions from the backed up fstab. Even if I didn't have a backup of fstab, it's easy to get the UUID of the partitions. Regards, Clifford Ilkay + 1 647-778-8696
On 07/10/17 08:53 PM, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
From fdisk, I could see that the Western Digital drive was GTP. The new Seagate drive identified itself as "dos", which means it is MBR. Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, they just stared at me.
Partitioning is not a property of the hardware, but of the data written to it. Manufactures my preformat a disk with MBR or GPT but your under no obligation to use it. As you've pointed out, you can change it after the fact, but that is a destructive operation. MBR and GPT are mutually exclusive. Picking on must be done before installation or writing of data you'll want to keep. I've developed a habit of zeroing the area where the two partition tables may live. Then letting my system boot normally, the install will offer to partition the disk appropriately for the type of disk, and manner in which we booted (UEFI vs MBR). dd bs=1M count=5 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX \ \ \ \ \- Your disk. \ \ \ \- A special device file that is infinite zeros \ \ \ 5 blocks worth from 'if', number is larger then needs to be \ \ Copy in block sizes of 1 megabyte \ 'Convert and Copy' -- Scott Sullivan
On Mon, Oct 09, 2017 at 10:53:13AM -0400, Scott Sullivan via talk wrote:
On 07/10/17 08:53 PM, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
From fdisk, I could see that the Western Digital drive was GTP. The new Seagate drive identified itself as "dos", which means it is MBR. Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, they just stared at me.
Partitioning is not a property of the hardware, but of the data written to it. Manufactures my preformat a disk with MBR or GPT but your under no obligation to use it.
As you've pointed out, you can change it after the fact, but that is a destructive operation. MBR and GPT are mutually exclusive. Picking on must be done before installation or writing of data you'll want to keep.
I've developed a habit of zeroing the area where the two partition tables may live. Then letting my system boot normally, the install will offer to partition the disk appropriately for the type of disk, and manner in which we booted (UEFI vs MBR).
dd bs=1M count=5 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX \ \ \ \ \- Your disk. \ \ \ \- A special device file that is infinite zeros \ \ \ 5 blocks worth from 'if', number is larger then needs to be \ \ Copy in block sizes of 1 megabyte \ 'Convert and Copy'
Remember the GPT is at the start AND end of the disk. You have to wipe both or the second copy of the GPT may bite you later. -- Len Sorensen
On 10/10/17 11:33 AM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Mon, Oct 09, 2017 at 10:53:13AM -0400, Scott Sullivan via talk wrote:
I've developed a habit of zeroing the area where the two partition tables may live. Then letting my system boot normally, the install will offer to partition the disk appropriately for the type of disk, and manner in which we booted (UEFI vs MBR).
dd bs=1M count=5 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX \ \ \ \ \- Your disk. \ \ \ \- A special device file that is infinite zeros \ \ \ 5 blocks worth from 'if', number is larger then needs to be \ \ Copy in block sizes of 1 megabyte \ 'Convert and Copy'
Remember the GPT is at the start AND end of the disk. You have to wipe both or the second copy of the GPT may bite you later.
Wat?! ((*runs to wikipedia*))... Okay then. I wonder under what conditions that secondary table is used. I've never had a front wiped disk continue to report a table afterwards. I see it mentions CRC checks, so maybe only when there is corporation in first table? A question for source code reading on another day. Anyways I haven't had to pull this sucker out in a few years... dd if=/dev/zero of=$YOUR_DEV bs=512 seek=$(( $(blockdev --getsz $YOUR_DEV) - 34 )) count=34 #adjust bs=4K for advanced format disks. Mostly only needed it for drives with dmraid, which stores it's config at the end of disks. Usually found on drives pulled from enterprise HP or DELL servers and/or the odd workstation. Thankfully in most cases, I'm installing a new GPT partition tables, so it would be reasonable assumption the backup would be over written. -- Scott Sullivan
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 11:41:01PM -0400, Scott Sullivan via talk wrote:
Wat?! ((*runs to wikipedia*))... Okay then.
I wonder under what conditions that secondary table is used. I've never had a front wiped disk continue to report a table afterwards. I see it mentions CRC checks, so maybe only when there is corporation in first table? A question for source code reading on another day.
The second copy us a backup in case the first gets corrupted. Some tools will notice it and ask if you want to restore the primary from the backup, which means not wiping the backup makes some tools think your disk should be GPT but something corrupted it.
Anyways I haven't had to pull this sucker out in a few years...
dd if=/dev/zero of=$YOUR_DEV bs=512 seek=$(( $(blockdev --getsz $YOUR_DEV) - 34 )) count=34 #adjust bs=4K for advanced format disks.
Mostly only needed it for drives with dmraid, which stores it's config at the end of disks. Usually found on drives pulled from enterprise HP or DELL servers and/or the odd workstation.
Thankfully in most cases, I'm installing a new GPT partition tables, so it would be reasonable assumption the backup would be over written.
gdisk has a nice 'zap' option that removes GPT from the disk. And yes creating a new GPT would certainly overwrite the old one. Only a problem if changing a disk from GPT to MBR. -- Len Sorensen
On 10/07/2017 08:53 PM, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, they just stared at me.
That's proof store clerks are not allowed to know what they're talking about. What does a disk drive care about what OS is on it? All it does is read/write data from specified locations on the disk.
| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | On 10/07/2017 08:53 PM, Howard Gibson via talk wrote: | > Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one | > is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older | > protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, | > they just stared at me. | | That's proof store clerks are not allowed to know what they're talking | about. What does a disk drive care about what OS is on it? All it does | is read/write data from specified locations on the disk. The PC world is full of hardware and software of various levels of conformance to various "standards". As a consequence, when someone builds a new component, they often try to trick old components into working. These tricks can sometimes be indistinguishable from bugs. Here are some such HDD tricks that I remember: - jumpers to have drives report smaller capacity to overcome OS or BIOS limitations - ATA drives that will pretend to have any geometry (picked from some clues during booting, I think). Of course they actually had no geometry - "hybrid" drives (HDD with modest SSD cache) that "knew" OS disk access patterns and allocated SSD to match - drives with 4k sectors that faked 512 sectors (to various extents) to allow old BIOSes to boot from them - drives that claimed their on-disk cache was flushed before it was. But I don't remember any disks that were not supported by Linux.
On 10/09/2017 04:24 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
The PC world is full of hardware and software of various levels of conformance to various "standards".
As a consequence, when someone builds a new component, they often try to trick old components into working. These tricks can sometimes be indistinguishable from bugs.
Many years ago, when I was a computer tech working on minicomputers, I had to configure an 8" hard drive to emulate a Data General Zebra disk pack drive. I recall setting up the partition so that it looked right to the operating system.
I once saw something like that when the disk had a leftover GPT partition and grub got confused and refused to boot, and fdisk A refused to partition because it complained about GPT, and gdisk claimed that the disk had MBR partition scheme. dd-ing zeroes over the first couple MB (8, IIRC, and overkill) got rid of the partition, made grub happy and allowed fdisk to partition the disk without complaining about GPT. On Oct 9, 2017 17:24, "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | On 10/07/2017 08:53 PM, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
| > Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one | > is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older | > protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, | > they just stared at me. | | That's proof store clerks are not allowed to know what they're talking | about. What does a disk drive care about what OS is on it? All it does | is read/write data from specified locations on the disk.
The PC world is full of hardware and software of various levels of conformance to various "standards".
As a consequence, when someone builds a new component, they often try to trick old components into working. These tricks can sometimes be indistinguishable from bugs.
Here are some such HDD tricks that I remember:
- jumpers to have drives report smaller capacity to overcome OS or BIOS limitations
- ATA drives that will pretend to have any geometry (picked from some clues during booting, I think). Of course they actually had no geometry
- "hybrid" drives (HDD with modest SSD cache) that "knew" OS disk access patterns and allocated SSD to match
- drives with 4k sectors that faked 512 sectors (to various extents) to allow old BIOSes to boot from them
- drives that claimed their on-disk cache was flushed before it was.
But I don't remember any disks that were not supported by Linux. --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
On Sat, Oct 07, 2017 at 08:53:37PM -0400, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
I am now completing my most difficult Linux install ever. My old hard drive with / and /home and /usr/local on it has died. My new 2TB drive was formatted for GTP. The Fedora installer warned me that GTP drives requre a /boot/efi partition. Regardless of how I partitioned, the system would not boot. I converted the drive to MBR format. The best I could get was to see the available kernels. It would not boot. I got fed up and I bought another new drive, and everything installed and booted effortlessly.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Version~1.1. (Version 3.0 supports GTP) New drive: Western Digital 2000GB SATA WD2003FZEX-0. Newer drive: Seagate ``Desktop HDD'' 2TB SATA. ST2000DM001-1ER1
From fdisk, I could see that the Western Digital drive was GTP. The new Seagate drive identified itself as "dos", which means it is MBR. Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older protocols. When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, they just stared at me.
The Western Digital drive works. It just does not work as a boot drive. I now have an /archive file system.
I put my install instructions up on my website in the hopes that I am helping newbies. I am trying to make sense of all this. Right now, I figure if you have an old computer with an old hard drive that works, you should be able to install Linux. If you have a new (GTP) system that works, you should be able to intall Linux on it. If you have an old clunker and the hard drive dies, look out!
Is this a Seagate versus Western Digital issue, or is my WD drive flakey? Can anybody make sense of all this? I would like to write this up as a useful document.
Usually when you buy a disk it is blank. Totally completely blank. It has no partition table, no partitionts, no filesystems. This explains why the store would look at you like you are nuts. Disks don't come with partition tables in general. External drives might come preformated and ready to use, but not internal drives. Whatever you plug it into first may take care of it for you. If it is larger than 2TB to use the full size you must use GPT, so many things default to that. Maybe the seagate is just under 2TB and the WD just over 2TB. Now it is possible to boot from a drive with GPT (not GTP) with an older bios using grub. To do it you have to create a GPT partition at the start of the disk of type "BIOS boot partition". This is where grub will place itself and point the MBR boot block at. You can't boot windows from it, but you can boot linux that way. Certainly the installer for Debian and Ubuntu support this. Maybe fedora doesn't. -- Len Sorensen
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