Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:11:51 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Cc: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> Subject: Re: Booting from 3TB drive (UFS, BIOS) Message-ID: <201208151111.51123.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <201208141323.q7EDNJhW019642@lurza.secnetix.de> References: <201208141323.q7EDNJhW019642@lurza.secnetix.de>
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On Tuesday, August 14, 2012 9:23:19 am Oliver Fromme wrote: > Hi, > > I've got a small PC that currently has two disks: The > first one is 1 TB with a standard MBR, used to boot FreeBSD, > and the second one is 3 TB with GPT, used as data disk for > FreeBSD (the BIOS doesn't have to care about this one at all > because it's not used for booting). > > Now I would like to replace the first disk with a 3 TB one, > too. However, will I be able to boot from it? The PC is > not exactly a new one (ASRock A330GC with Atom 330 processor, > a few years old) and has a standard BIOS (dated 07/16/2009). > > I understand that I will have to use GPT in order to be able > to use the full capacity of 3 TB, and that I will have to > install a pmbr to enable the BIOS to detect the disk as > bootable. Is this correct? Will that work? (Assuming that > the boot partition will have to be within the first 2 TB of > the drive, of course.) > > If everything else fails, I'd consider using an additional > drive for booting, probably an SSD. But I'd like to avoid > this if possible. A GPT boot should work, and the boot partition can even be above 2 TB. (GPT booting only uses the EDD BIOS interface which uses 64-bit LBAs, and the GPT boot code will use all 64-bits of the LBAs stored in GPT, etc.) -- John Baldwin
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