On Wednesday May 6 2009, Greg Freemyer wrote:
...
Have you guys considered the drive may have a GPT instead of a standard IBM Partition Table? They are the defacto standard for large drives and required for over 2TB drives.
fdisk does NOT support them. Vista / Win 2008 does for non-boot drives. (Older does not.)
Many / all Macs use GPT by default, even for the boot drive.
I think it became the default with the introduction of the Intel-based Macs, but I'm not sure about that.
Trouble is I don't know how to check for a GPT from Linux. (I have commercial tools I use that handle it transparently.)
You might try "file -s" (the -s means read the contents of device file rather than reporting that it is a device).
The linux kernel should autodetect a GPT I'm pretty sure, but who knows how often that gets tested.
I had the impression that my WD MyBook (1 TB) was GPT, but at the moment I'm not sure and while I have it connected to my openSUSE 11.1 box on an essentially permanent basis, I see no indication in /var/log/messages mentioning GPT. File says this: % file -s /dev/sde /dev/sde: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0xaf, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 976762584 sectors; partition 2: ID=0xa8, starthead 254, startsector 976762710, 976762458 sectors But if, as you say, fdisk doesn't support GPT, then the fact that it's happy with this drive suggests it's _not_ GPT.
Greg
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org