On 01/17/12 23:23, Ariane van der Steldt wrote:
Hi Nathan,
On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 07:42:24AM +0100, Ariane van der Steldt wrote:
On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 07:49:12PM -0600, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
On 01/13/12 19:16, [email protected] wrote:
FreeBSD installer changed my MBR-only partition table to MBR+GPT
partition table.
The other OS does not have GPT logic; I want to be at least warned
this is happening and prefer to have the option at least.
Alternatively, the installer may opt not to install a GPT if the disk
does not require it (as in the case in this machine)
Can you give some more details here? This is something that the
installer is not programmed to do and that I cannot reproduce.
Sure. I used a VM to reproduce the problem, so I could provide pretty
screenshots in an attempt to better explain the problem.
Pre-install:
only 1 OS installed, windows XP, using MBR partition table.
Using a live CD, I can instruct fdisk to (pointlessly) alter the active
partition, as can be seen in attached screenshot 1
Post-install:
Both windows XP and FreeBSD are installed.
Unfortunately, fdisk can no longer be used to alter the active
partition, gpart is to be used instead.
As can be seen in attached screenshot 2, fdisk fails.
After install, only gpart can be used to change the active partition.
Upon rereading the manpage for gpart, I'm wondering if what I concluded
really happened. On closer examination, it's possible the geom logic
blocked fdisk from modifying the partition table. Can you tell me how I
can confirm out what partitioning schemes are present on my harddisk?
I put the output of gpart show at the bottom of the e-mail, which
suggests the mbr scheme is used regardless.
If geom indeed blocks fdisk from altering the partition table, I'm
wondering what the use of the binary is though, as it seems gpart does
everything fdisk does, but without failing.
# gpart show
=> 63 1250263665 ada0 MBR (596G)
63 209712447 1 ntfs [active] (100G)
209712510 102398310 2 ntfs (48G)
312110820 937426896 3 freebsd (447G)
1249537716 726012 - free - (354M)
=> 0 937426896 ada0s3 BSD (447G)
0 929038336 1 freebsd-ufs (443G)
929038336 8388559 2 freebsd-swap (4G)
937426895 1 - free - (512B)
That implies it's just MBR + BSD label. Why did you think it was GPT?
Geom does prevent many utilities from altering the partition table. I
was under the impression that fdisk had been modified to actually use
geom these days, so it should have worked, but it's possible that didn't
work somehow.
-Nathan
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