Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:27:37 -0500 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Cc: Dan Naumov <dan.naumov@gmail.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: booting off GPT partitions Message-ID: <201001271627.37955.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <cf9b1ee01001270845j772d5524tbc2cbd53e70890a7@mail.gmail.com> References: <cf9b1ee01001270845j772d5524tbc2cbd53e70890a7@mail.gmail.com>
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On Wednesday 27 January 2010 11:45:36 am Dan Naumov wrote: > Hey > > I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT > partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that > I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel > D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now > I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I > contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), > who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is > supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current > motherboards have support for this. > > Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided? GPT was defined along with EFI, so many folks assume that you have to use EFI to boot a GPT-labelled disk. However, FreeBSD has its own BIOS-based bootstrap that can handle GPT-labelled disks. I doubt the SuperMicro tech is familiar with that case. I thought I heard that some folks had added GPT support to grub as well. -- John Baldwin
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