[Fedora-livecd-list] Using both EFI and MBR at once on Live USB images

[Stewart Adam]

Hi,

I've been trying to get the Fedora 10 Snapshot ISO to work boot via a USB key
on my MacBook Pro using the --mactel option, and while I think GRUB's EFI
image has a bug in it since no kernels boot [1], it gave me another idea.

I thought it would be pretty cool if we could synchronize the GPT and
MSDOS partition tables (complete with MBR), similar to how it's used in
BootCamp/rEFIt so that any given live media could be used with EFI or with
BIOS. I've packaged rEFIt [2] (which includes gptsync) but since there's
only one partition on the Live USB media, gptsync immediately says "nothing
to do" and exits. One way around this would be to use two-partitions on the
live media, but that would troublesome since Windows will only recognize the
first readable partition. The other way would be to patch gptsync and have
it translate the EFI partition to "FAT32" for the MSDOS partition table.

I'd like to hear your comments/feedback on this - Do you think it's a
feature worth spending time on? Any other ideas for workarounds?

Stewart


[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=466954
[2] http://downloads.diffingo.com/refit-0.11-1.fc9.src.rpm