[GTALUG] MBR and GTP Drives

[Clifford Ilkay]

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 12:43 PM, Howard Gibson via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> My motherboard is five years old.  One of the things Linux is supposed to
> do is work on old computers.  Mine still is reasonably new.  It sounds like
> people running old computers need to by hard drives from second hand stores.


The motherboard in my machine is now eight years old. I have an 8TB drive
connected to it, though it is not the boot device. I use a 120GB SSD for a
boot device. All partitions are GPT and I'm running Fedora 26. The BIOS is
old enough that it doesn't support UEFI. I do not have to buy drives from
second hand stores. I don't think it's good practice to have everything on
one physical device anyway because that makes upgrades/reinstalls
potentially more dangerous. I've updated Fedora in-place for the last few
releases but if I ever had to do a fresh install, I could do so easily
without any risk of making a mistake that would clobber data on the
partition that I use for /home or the installer having a bug that mucks up
the partition table.

Before I do a fresh install, I make a backup of fstab, and unplug the
physical devices that I don't want the installer touching from the
motherboard so that the installer can't even see them. I install on the
boot device, turn the machine off when it has finished, reconnect the other
drives, and after booting the new OS, modify fstab to mount the partitions
that were offline in the appropriate places using the UUIDs for the
partitions from the backed up fstab. Even if I didn't have a backup of
fstab, it's easy to get the UUID of the partitions.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

+ 1 647-778-8696
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20171009/80630c37/attachment.html>