[Fedora-livecd-list] Using both EFI and MBR at once on Live USB images

[Jeremy Katz]

On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 22:44 -0400, Stewart Adam wrote:
> I thought it would be pretty cool if we could synchronize the GPT and
> MSDOS partition tables (complete with MBR), similar to how it's used in
> BootCamp/rEFIt so that any given live media could be used with EFI or with
> BIOS. I've packaged rEFIt [2] (which includes gptsync) but since there's
> only one partition on the Live USB media, gptsync immediately says "nothing
> to do" and exits. One way around this would be to use two-partitions on the
> live media, but that would troublesome since Windows will only recognize the
> first readable partition. The other way would be to patch gptsync and have
> it translate the EFI partition to "FAT32" for the MSDOS partition table.

First for the obvious question -- did you change the partition table on
the USB stick you're testing with to be a GPT partition table?  And then
had one partition inside that?

You can't change the partition type of the GPT partition to anything
other than 'ee' in the MSDOS partition table if you want to keep EFI
happy with it.

Multiple partitions might be a workaround, although, yeah, it would kind
of suck.  Probably worth trying I guess.

Jeremy