bootstrapping from a USB stick

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>

| On Aug 31, 2014, at 9:00 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
| 
| > I have an oldish PC that only understands booting from 512-byte
| > sectors and then only with MBR disks.
| > 
| > I want to install large new disks on it, and no old disks.  These
| > don't even pretend to do 512-byte sectors: 4k all the way (3T and 4T sizes
| > aren't good for MBR either).
| 
| Uhhh, I haven't seen bare drives in the wild with 4096 byte logical and 
| physical sectors.

You were right about that (and I was wrong).  Thanks!

So I didn't need the mess and bother of a flash stick.

| Old PC's might be OK with GPT so long as there's also a protective MBR. 
| By default anaconda/blivet (the Fedora installer), creates a protective 
| MBR, but also sets a non-standard flag its 0xEE entry that tricks most 
| computer BIOS into accepting GPT. But there are quite a few BIOS that 
| will just face plant. So you have to test it to know for sure.

I actually installed Ubuntu 14.04 on the drive (for MythBuntu).  It
required a mysterious tiny partition at the start but didn't explain
much about it.  The result worked.

Then the requirements changed and I threw the result away :-)