GPT and Fedora 17

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2012-03-02 at 17:37 +0000, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> 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.

So it seems the boot flag on protective MBR does not, in fact, fix all
Lenovos, Brian...
-- 
Adam Williamson
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