[parted-devel] 3TB drives available at retail; anyone tried parted with 'em?

[Jim Meyering]

John Gilmore wrote:
...
> I was thinking you could manipulate the fake MBR at the front of a GPT
> drive to useful effect, e.g. allowing an old BIOS to boot a GPT drive.
> If you think so too, there's a great page here:
>
>   http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html
>
> about "Hybrid MBRs" and all the problems you can find with them.  (The
> page also says parted wipes out any hybrid MBRs it finds, at least in
> version 1.9.0; has that been fixed?)

I don't know off hand, but there was a hybrid-related
bug that was fixed in 2.2:

  gpt: read-only operation could clobber MBR part of hybrid GPT+MBR table
  [bug introduced in parted-2.1]

So far, I've kept Parted out of the hybrid-market, partly because
it will end up having been just a passing fad, and there are existing
tools that meet that need.
Eventually all systems will be able to boot from GPT-partitioned disks.