Well, really, I'm pretty sure that what you describe is what parted does now: The<div>MBR is effectively a "dummy". The EFI specs, which are where GPT is defined,</div><div>state that there will be an MBR and that it will have (if I remember...), exactly one
</div><div>entry, the "protective partition" which covers the entire disk so that non-GPT-aware</div><div>tools won't treat the disk as blank. This so far is not really a hybrid scheme, it's</div><div>how GPT is supposed to work. Any GPT-aware OS or program is supposed to
</div><div>use the GPT entries and ignore the MBR ones.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>True "hybrid" GPT/MBR partitioning schemes are basically an informal hack, and</div><div>the gptsync program is the operative definition of what they are and how they work.
</div><div>They were created to allow non-GPT-aware versions of Windows to boot from</div><div>devices with non-MBR-aware firmware; namely, Intel Macs. The MBR therefore</div><div>exists solely for Windows's benefit, and there's no reason it strictly has to reflect
</div><div>every partition that the GPT does, but that's the idea right now. Since GPT can</div><div>have arbitrarily many entries whereas MBR is strictly limited to four, it's not really</div><div>clear what Parted's role in this should be...
</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>While people are paying attention, I'd like to just point out another GPT issue, which</div><div>is that as things stand there is no way I'm aware of to use parted to correct a broken
</div><div>GPT table which has an invalid uuid for the type of one partition. I never saw any</div><div>response to my email on this topic a couple weeks ago. :) I did already write a tool</div><div>to do that, but it would be great if the functionality could be rolled into parted...
</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 23, 2007 5:40 PM, H. Peter Anvin <<a href="mailto:hpa@zytor.com">hpa@zytor.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">Matt Davis wrote:<br>> On Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 02:27:57PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:<br>>> Matt Davis wrote:<br>>>> On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 10:16:21PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:<br>
>>>> Is there any sane way to support GPT-MBR hybrid partitioning in parted?<br>>>>> This is required for booting on BIOS-based machines (the standard MBR<br>>>>> handover protocol doesn't really work for GPT), but GPT is needed to
<br>>>>> support > 2 TB.<br>>>>><br>>>>> At least /boot should be in the MBR; some "other OSes" may need their<br>>>>> boot partition MBR-side as well.<br>>>> hpa,
<br>>>> While I do not have an answer for you, I have been working, in my free<br>>>> time, to<br>>>> try to allow Parted to convert from one partition table type to another,<br>>>> such as
<br>>>> gpt to mbr, or vice versa.<br>>>><br>>> Well, the hybrid is really another partitioning scheme, in many ways.<br>>> It's a little different than either.<br>><br>> Yep, I am not familiar with that. However, I did notice the opportunity to keep
<br>> people up-to-date with what is going on regarding similar issue.<br>><br><br></div>The idea with hybrid partition is that you have both a GPT and an MBR.<br>The MBR has the boot partition(s), or possibly all partitions below 2
<br>TB, plus a "protective partition" (type 0xEE); the GPT has the other ones.<br><font color="#888888"><br> -hpa<br></font><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>_______________________________________________
<br>parted-devel mailing list<br><a href="mailto:parted-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">parted-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/parted-devel" target="_blank">http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/parted-devel
</a><br></div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Dan Knapp<br>"An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured." (Konrad Adenauer)
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