Memstick image differences between 8.x and 9.x

[Garrett Cooper]

On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 7:50 PM, Thomas K. <fwd at gothschlampen.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2011 at 07:28:55PM -0600, Warren Block wrote:
>> On Sun, 9 Oct 2011, Matt Thyer wrote:
>> >On Oct 9, 2011 11:04 AM, "Nathan Whitehorn" <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On 10/08/11 19:25, Matt Thyer wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >There is also the interesting question of actually installing to GPT on the hard disk, which is the default in 9.0. Does this not work on some systems? If so, do we want to blacklist
>> >them and use a different default partition scheme? Can we identify systems that violate regular PC boot standards and reject GPT? Any data on any of these points would be appreciated.
>> >>
>> >I don't think there have been any reports of failure to boot properly formatted GPT yet.
>>
>> Lenovo T420S and T520, from the links above.  Install GPT on the
>> hard drive, try to boot.
>>
>> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26304
>> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26759
>> http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=98078
>
> As I used parted from Linux to fix the alternate GPT, i.e. put it not at the
> end of the image data but on the end of the disk, and it still did not appear
> in the boot device list, the Acer AX3960 should probably be on the list
> as well.
>
> Being a Core i7 2600k system maybe 6 months old, it's rather recent hardware,
> but doesn't boot from the memstick image.

MBR format would be a better idea considering that there are a number
of catches to using GPT (as noted on the list), and we're probably not
anywhere near producing 2TB+ images (yet :)..), and to quote Monty
Python MBR: "I'm not dead yet!". If it comes to that day and age, we
could provide a script or standalone command that would do the gpart
foo to write out the partition table and just copy the image to the
first partition, correct?

Seems like more OSes should run into this issue producing GPT
partitioned media than just us..

-Garrett