UEFI install on MBR partition scheme, was: Failed attempt to fpaste UEFI failure data

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2013-12-14 at 16:40 -0800, Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX wrote:
> On 12/14/2013 03:22 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> > On Dec 14, 2013, at 3:29 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> It does not. So it sounds like Chuck's trying to do a UEFI install to an
> >> msdos-labelled disk, and that's the problem.
> > I think this could use an RFE on the error message to be more clear what the problem is.
> >
> >> Chuck, you can't do a UEFI
> >> install to a disk with an msdos disk label (partition table). If you can
> >> blow the entire disk away, then choose a partition layout that does so,
> >> and anaconda should automatically reformat it to gpt for you. If there
> >> is stuff on the disk you can't stand to lose, then you only have the
> >> choice of doing a BIOS install of Fedora.
> > Or convert from MBR to GPT using gdisk.
> >
> >> Chris, I'm trying to remember - we were discussing something like this
> >> around the time of F19 release, and thinking of changing it. But I can't
> >> recall if it was 'EFI system partition must be FAT32' or 'UEFI system
> >> must be installed to a gpt-labelled disk' which was the assumption we
> >> were questioning. Either way, I'm sure there was an assumption anaconda
> >> was making in this area which we'd found not to be entirely true.
> > I don't remember. But yes for system partitions it's FAT32, and for removable devices it's FAT12 or FAT16. The UEFI spec allows either GPT or MBR disks, and there's an EFI System Partition type code for both partition schemes. For MBR this is 0xEF and this code is missing from libparted/labels/dos.c, and blivet uses pyparted which hooks into libparted, I really don't think anaconda is going to use MBR disks on UEFI computers.
> >
> > Chris Murphy
> I initialized a scratch disk with parted and was able to boot
> netinst under UEFI and install Heisenbug.
> 
> Concerning Fedora's inability to boot from UEFI and install to
> a fdisk configured disk:   A relevant error message would have
> been most useful.
> 
> And mow for the acid test - I plan on initializing a 4 TB disk with
> parted and then install Win7 and Heisenbug on it.

It's not really reducible to which utility you use. Both fdisk and
parted can create ms-dos or gpt disk labels. If you want to pre-create a
layout for a UEFI install, just make sure you use a gpt one.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net