Neil Bothwick <neil <at> digimed.co.uk> writes:
> > First determine if the motherboards is a Bios or EFI variety. > > Then, decide which bootloader you are going to use:: grub(legacy) grub2, > > lilo, gummi, EFI, etc etc? Last, how many different distros will you > > ultimately be booting off that disk. > > Then with that data, decide which formatting tool to use. (Others will > > disagree with this logical progression, which is good as long as they > > refine there reasons, explicitly.) > I agree up until the last paragraph. You can use gdisk and a GPT whether > you are using BIO or EFI. The difference is in your first partition. For > EFI it must be type EF00 and formatted with FAT. For BIOS booting you > need to start the disk with a small BIOS compatibility partition of type > EF02. This is 1M here and you don't format or use it, it just has to be > there. I do not diagree what you are stating. I'll try it again. My logic is hopefully sound, but might not appeal to everyone. It's what I'm working on for my cluster/node reconfiguration tool which will eventually boot embedded, many different arches and also use a variety of (i)PXE style node wake-ups and fast boots with images served from servers. Hence the need for one generic HD partition scheme:: (no raid decision tree) so drives and systems can be moved around into a variety of test configurations as easily as possible. 1. Is the disk a boot disk. (ignore additional disks for now. Most are 2G sata drives. 2. (assuming yes) Which distros will be booting off that disk. 3. Determine if the motherboards is a Bios or EFI variety. 4. Select a bootloader. (grub-1 grub-2 etc. 5. Specify the (example:boot/root/swap) partition scheme according to previous data, ignoring other optional partitions for this example. 6. Select the partition tool. Note:: a generic default (generic) partition scheme, shown below will work for both Bios and EFI systems, so if a HD is moved between different mobos, all else being same it should not have to be reformatted. <what would that default generic partition scheme look like for just boot, root and swap that works on both mbr(bios) and efi motherboards?> Hopefully this makes sense, as the basis of a collection of systems to test a variety of cluster architectures, DFS and clusters codes, on identical hardware to validate performance comparison.... James
