[Fedora-livecd-list] Using both EFI and MBR at once on Live USB images

[Stewart Adam]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 08:00 -0400, Stewart Adam wrote:
>> Jeremy Katz wrote:
>>> First for the obvious question -- did you change the partition table on
>>> the USB stick you're testing with to be a GPT partition table?  And then
>>> had one partition inside that?
>>>
>>> You can't change the partition type of the GPT partition to anything
>>> other than 'ee' in the MSDOS partition table if you want to keep EFI
>>> happy with it.
>>>
>>> Multiple partitions might be a workaround, although, yeah, it would kind
>>> of suck.  Probably worth trying I guess.
>> For the tests I just created a new stick with --mactel (it told me
>> it would erase all data and make a GPT table for me) and from there
>> I just ran gptsync which said "nothing to do". So essentially, it's
>> still an unmodified USB stick...
> 
> With a quick look at the gptsync code, this might actually be a bug in
> gptsync -- it looks like it only does the sync if the number of
> partitions doesn't match.  So getting rid of that check and making it
> unconditionally sync might help
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> 
Hm, I tried again and I got my errors mixed up. It actually says that 
there's no data partition (only the EFI system one) so there's no need to 
sync as the EFI system partition is always marked EFI Protective in the MBR. 
If it isn't, then installing anything to the MBR risks erasing the entire 
GPT data structure...

So the after all the only option seems to be to use multiple partitions, 
which I don't think will work well. I'm still going to try a few things 
though... If GRUB can install to the MBR on the "EFI Protective" partition 
and it realizes that "EFI Protective" is just FAT32, things might work out 
on a single partition.

Stewart