Paritioning scheme on MBR disk doubts

[Javier]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 19:02:08 +0200
Ralf Mardorf <ralf-mardorf at riseup.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 16:02:35 +0200, Javier wrote:
> >Anyway, all this makes me ask now... does FreeBSD have any kind of
> >limitation I could suffer in the way the MBR implementation is
> >setup/programmed?
> 
> I'm not aware of limitation you need to worry about in real world
> scenarios, other than...
>
> (I'm mainly a Linux multi-boot user. I migrated from GRUB legacy to
> GRUB 2 to syslinux. However, in the past I also chainloaded FreeBSD.
> All my old internal HDDs were, as well as my new internal SSDs and
> external HDDs are <= 2 TiB MBR drives only.)

Hi,

thanks for the support answer.

My concern was what I wrote in the initial mail, but the conversation
was routed to these MBR possible issues I never found and that got
weird ;)

So doubts, I guess, solved. I have others related to the system
itself, but may come some day when I face them.


> ...the other day I read something scary. It's not related to an
> operating system, bootloader or partitioning tool. It's a hardware
> issue.
> 
> Some mobo vendors have dropped legacy BIOS support, thus they
> dropped booting an operating system from MBR formatted devices.
> It's required to migrate from MBR to GPT for those drives, if there
> is the need to replace a mobo, by another one that doesn't provide
> a legacy BIOS option. IIRC the related Unified Extensible Firmware
> Interface term for booting MBR partitions is "CSM support". 


Thanks to point this out.

The same as some software isn't being released as 64-bit anymore,
that would happen at some time too.

Despite retro compatibility is a good thing, when MBR has limits on
disk size and new disk sizes are getting larger and larger without
opportunity to stick on less size disks, it is something that would
happen in the end :/

Also new mobo usually means new socket, new CPU, new RAM, etc... so,
maybe a disk with MBR is the less important if at least we keep tools
to access the data.

Regards.