[GTALUG] MBR and GTP Drives

[Howard Gibson]

   I am now completing my most difficult Linux install ever.  My old hard drive with / and /home and /usr/local on it has died.  My new 2TB drive was formatted for GTP.  The Fedora installer warned me that GTP drives requre a /boot/efi partition.  Regardless of how I partitioned, the system would not boot.  I converted the drive to MBR format.  The best I could get was to see the available kernels.  It would not boot.  I got fed up and I bought another new drive, and everything installed and booted effortlessly.  

Motherboard:  Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Version~1.1. (Version 3.0 supports GTP)
New drive:    Western Digital 2000GB SATA WD2003FZEX-0.
Newer drive:  Seagate ``Desktop HDD'' 2TB SATA. ST2000DM001-1ER1

   From fdisk, I could see that the Western Digital drive was GTP.  The new Seagate drive identified itself as "dos", which means it is MBR.  Best Buy offered me a newer Seagate at a slightly lower price but one is claimed explicity to support Linux, and it supports some older protocols.  When I told the people at the store I wanted MBR, not GTP, they just stared at me.

   The Western Digital drive works.  It just does not work as a boot drive.  I now have an /archive file system.

   I put my install instructions up on my website in the hopes that I am helping newbies.  I am trying to make sense of all this.  Right now, I figure if you have an old computer with an old hard drive that works, you should be able to install Linux.  If you have a new (GTP) system that works, you should be able to intall Linux on it.  If you have an old clunker and the hard drive dies, look out!

   Is this a Seagate versus Western Digital issue, or is my WD drive flakey?  Can anybody make sense of all this?  I would like to write this up as a useful document.  

-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgibson at eol.ca
jhowardgibson at gmail.com
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson