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Date:      Mon, 8 Mar 2010 12:16:50 -0600
From:      Scot Hetzel <swhetzel@gmail.com>
To:        Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com>
Cc:        xcllnt@mac.com, avg@icyb.net.ua, freebsd-geom@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: another gpt vs mbr (sanity) check
Message-ID:  <790a9fff1003081016q2b6a7d93qa55055aaaa9cf74@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <E1Noh4B-000JjD-5u@dilbert.ticketswitch.com>
References:  <761C8533-B1DC-4DC7-8B2E-9CB1A8A5BEF8@mac.com> <E1Noh4B-000JjD-5u@dilbert.ticketswitch.com>

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On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Pete French
<petefrench@ticketswitch.com> wrote:
>> To clarify: the protective MBR is there only to protect the GPT
>> disk from tools that do not understand the GPT. Any GPT-aware
>> tool will treat the disk as a GPT disk. Consequently: the MBR
>> is inferior to the GPT...
>
> The queston is then, why isn't Windows treating it as GPT ? It's

I have both MBR and GPT formated drives installed in my laptop, and
Windows 7 correctly identifies both drives.  The GPT drive was
formated using FreeBSD 8.

> all very nice in theory, but if the practical upshot is that
> we get flash media which will read perfectly well in all operating
> systems except for BSD then thats not a good result, even if it
> is theoretically correct. Which is the situation the original poster
> appeared to have.
>

The problem the original poster was having is this:

Format drive as GPT
Re-Format drive as MBR

FreeBSD still sees the drive as GPT instead of MBR.

The reason is that FreeBSD is still detecting the Seconday GPT which
is located at the end of the disk, and using it due to the Primary GPT
was lost/corrupted when the drive was reformated as MBR disk.

The real question is how was the drive reformated.  If it was
reformated using gpart:

- Delete all existing partitions:
gpart delete -i X adY
- Destroy the GPT formated drive
gpart destroy adY
- Create the MBR formated drive
gpart create -s mbr adY

And the secondary GPT header still exists, then it is a FreeBSD bug.
But if it was reformated using a different tool, then it is a bug in
that tool for not reconizing that the original disk was formated as
GPT.

Scot



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