Tore Anderson wrote:
As I understand it the GPT detection code fails if it doesn't find a valid "Protective MBR", ie. a MSDOS partition table with one partition, spanning the whole drive, with the type set to 0xEE. Am I wrong assuming that such a partition table will almost certainly never be found on such a broken USB device that doesn't have a GPT, and thus there should be no problem?
It appears that is a recent change[0]. Patch is part of that thread, at [1]. [0] also mentions that BIOS support for EFI may become more common during sarge's lieftime.
[Older versions didn't used to check for the signature, and always read the last sector, causing iPod Minis among others to crash.]
With that change, it should be safe to enable EFI. Please do so. Especially a EFI-enabled kernel can be gotten onto d-i images, d-i would then fully support > 2TiB disks.
[0] http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/11/7/104 [1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/11/9/272