F17 bootloader error

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-02-16 at 08:30 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Feb 16, 2012, at 2:45 AM, Mike Chambers wrote:
> 
> > I don't have a BIOS boot partition now on F16 and it had to be GPT when
> > I first installed it. So what's the difference and do I *have* to have
> > it on F17 because of a change?

Nothing has changed since F16 regarding this, nothing at all. It's easy
enough to check if your disk is GPT or MS-DOS: run
'parted /dev/XdX' (with the appropriate device, obviously) and type
'print'. There's a 'Partition Table:' line in the output, it tells you
'gpt' or 'msdos'.

> The exact same message happens on F16 with GPT disks using the
> customize installation type, if you forget to create a BIOS Boot
> partition. 
> 
> I don't think GRUB2 devs mean for BIOS Boot to be required per se, but
> I think it's a good enough idea for a distribution to require it,
> because on GPT disks there's no obvious safe place for core.img to go,

Indeed, grub2 is pretty much incidental here. It's the GPT disk label
which causes anaconda to require a BIOS boot partition, not the use of
grub2 as the bootloader.

grub2's core image is somewhat larger than grub1's, but that's not
_really_ either here nor there. Neither can reliably be expected to fit
into the MBR space on a GPT-labelled disk. (grub2's sometimes doesn't
fit even into the MBR+embedding space on an MS-DOS labelled partition,
but that's a different question...)
-- 
Adam Williamson
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