GPT and Fedora 17

[Pádraig Brady]

On 02/07/2012 12:54 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 23:19 +0000, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> On 02/06/2012 10:40 PM, Brian C. Lane wrote:
>>> In Fedora 16 we changed to using GPT as the default disklabel for new
>>> installs. In a few cases, mostly limited to Lenovo hardware, we found
>>> that some BIOS's would not boot from GPT. We blacklisted Lenovo, falling
>>> back to msdos labels in order to solve this.
>>>
>>> Thanks to Matthew Garrett we found that switching on the boot flag of
>>> the GPT's protective MBR these BIOS's would then boot from GPT. Matthew
>>> wrote a patch for parted to allow controlling this flag using the
>>> disk_set pmbr_boot command in parted. This is in parted-3.0-7
>>>
>>> In anaconda-17.6 I have reverted the Lenovo blacklist and changed things
>>> so that pmbr_boot is always set on GPT labeled installs. This should
>>> ensure that thing boot correctly.
>>>
>>> If this still causes problems the symptom will be that grub never starts
>>> and the bios may complain about not being able to find an OS. If you
>>> have problems with this please open a bug with the output from dmidecode
>>>
>>> You can still force usage of msdos partitions by passing nogpt on the
>>> kernel cmdline.
>>
>> Hmm, I tried that workaround I think on my Lenovo T520 with BIOS 1.29,
>> and it didn't help.  I.E. point (1.) from the link referenced here:
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=735733#c31
>>
>> Fingers crossed I just missed something at the time.
>> I'll try out again tomorrow maybe.
> 
> Yes, I remember that. Please do test the change out and let us know the
> results, we'd definitely like to know.

Yep as expected F17 alpha is broken in the same way on my laptop.

cheers,
Pádraig.