To GPT or MBR? 2
GPT or MBR? Which do you use for partitioning and why?
I haven’t decided yet. None of my HDDs are over 2TB, so GPT is not forced, but the limitations of MBR disk partitions is a real concern.
This article Make the most of large drives with GPT and Linux has me rethinking my plans to stay with MBR for new RAID1 drives. I have some external USB3 disks that may need to be changed too.
The real concern is an Ubuntu 10.04 Server might not support GPT well enough to be used. That machine has the RAID and external disks today. None of the drives involved will be used for boot, so that does remove THAT concern.
I could really use some help deciding. Thoughts? Suggestions?
GPT really isn’t the problem, linux works great with it, and for quite a while.
BUT—
Grub and the distros support for UEFI is really crap, If you put GPT on the boot drive, it will get messy most of the time.
Even with the latest beta of Ubuntu 12.10 I can’t get it to boot reliably on my machine with UEFI to perform the install. Once you get it on, details on using Grub2 with GPT disks are hard to find, and many guides information are outright wrong, so it is difficult to do many customizations with boot and such.
My advice is stick with MBR, unless you have a drive over 2TB or RAID volume – or you really need to have more than 4 Primary partitions on your drive (logical partitions and LVM work better)
According to the Ubuntu Forums, Grub2 needs a 1MB partition marked as bios_grub (or is that grub-bios?) so it doesn’t get confused. Then /boot (ext2) needs to be created – 100-500MB is enough. Then use your normal partitioning methods for swap, / and /home.
I haven’t tested any of this myself. The new, larger, HDDs will be RAID devices here, not used for OS or boot. They will never be used for OS or boot. I’m very comfortable saying that. Even in an emergency, the (4) 320GB HDDs that will be replaced by the new disks will be preferable.
UEFI raises different issues. I don’t expect to deal with that for a few more years – at least.