Re: Problem booting debian on HP rx4610 itanium

['Richard Hirst' <rhirst@linuxcare.com>]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 03:17:11PM +0100, TEUWEN,ROEL (Non-HP-Belgium,ex1) wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> Thanks a lot for clarifying this. A low-level format of the disk before
> installing debian fixed the problem for me. All is ok now.
> I am now able to install kernels using elilo again.
> 
> Any ideas (when/if) the GPT scheme will be supported under Debian ?

Sorry, don't know.  We would probably have to switch the installer to
using parted instead of cfdisk, and the parted interface is not as
user friendly.  Would probably also be nice if the old tools at least
recognised that a disk had a GPT and warned you first.

Actually, we could possibly provide parted as well as cfdisk, even
if it meant having to drop in to a shell to run parted at first.

btw, debian parted does understand GPT, the following is under debian
sid, on a disk set up by RedHat with GPT:

root@nelly:/build/util-linux/util-linux-2.11m/fdisk# fdisk /dev/sdc

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdc: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 522 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1             1       523   4194156+  ee  EFI GPT
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(0, 0, 0) logical=(0, 0, 2)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(522, 37, 53)

Command (m for help): q

root@nelly:/build/util-linux/util-linux-2.11m/fdisk# parted /dev/sdc
GNU Parted 1.4.20
Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the
implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for
more details.

Using /dev/sdc
(parted) p
Disk geometry for /dev/sdc: 0.000-4095.856 megabytes
Disk label type: GPT
Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Name                  Flags
1          0.031     70.598  FAT                               boot, lba
2         70.598   2070.878  ext2                              lba
3       2070.879   3074.941  linux-swap                        lba
(parted) 


Richard