Questions about GPT partitioned disks (on i386/amd64)

Eye of the Beholder eye.of.the.8eholder at gmail.com
Mon Jan 15 22:24:15 UTC 2007


Hello.

I have an Intel Pentium4 Cpu with EMT64 and have installed
7.0-CURRENT-200701-amd64-disc1.iso on my 120GB sata disk.

I have a second sata disk that i use for transfers.
I tried experimenting with GPT on this second disk and i want to ask some
questions.

Originally, i had setup the disk using gnu parted from my slackware linux.
FreeBSD saw the 2 partitions i had fine and i mounted the ext3 partitions fine.

I saw that each partition type has a uuid that is recognised by.
I have made a "swap" partition and a "ufs" partition using the FreeBSD gpt tool.

1) When i add a gpt partition, do i need to disklabel it like in the mbr world ?
From what i understood since there is a different uuid for swap/ufs partitions, i can use
the partition without using disklabel (just use the partition like in the linux world)

2) If the disk is used for data then everything is fine but what about booting from a gpt disk ?
I have successfully booted slackware linux from the gpt disk using grub2 in a floppy disk, but i
haven't tried boot FreeBSD yet because i am not that keen with FreeBSD yet.

3) Has anyone booted FreeBSD from a gpt disk ?

4) Can i use fdisk (or any other tool) to put the FreeBSD loader on the gpt ufs partition ?
From what i read in www.freebsd.org the boot loader doesn't support gpt (at the time the web page
was written)

I am sorry if my questions are already answered, but i haven't found much info either in the
mailing list archives or google. All the info i find is about ia64 which has native efi/gpt support
and is different.

Thank you for your time.


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