how to tell when biosboot partition is needed?

[Richard Neuboeck]

On 16.08.12 09:46, Vratislav Podzimek wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-08-15 at 18:29 -0700, Steve Rikli wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 09:08:10AM +0200, Richard Neuboeck wrote:
>>> I've got an answer from David Lehman how the decision process for the
>>> usage of biosboot works in anaconda:
>>>
>>> Here is the entire decision tree:
>>>
>>> - did the system boot in EFI mode or BIOS mode?
>>>   - EFI
>>>     - use gpt and never make biosboot
>>>   - BIOS
>>>     - is the disk larger than the max for msdos (2TB)?
>>>       - yes
>>>         - use gpt and ensure there's a biosboot partition
>>>       - no
>>>         - use msdos
>>
>> Either I'm not following that logic or I think something isn't behaving
>> as advertised.  Here's my situation ....
>>
>> I have a bog standard Dell PowerEdge 1850 -- same test machine I used in
>> the initial Fedora 16 work that prompted me to start this thread -- which
>> has no EFI, and boots from an old & small (20GB) SCSI disk.
>>
>> If I read the above correctly, I should _not_ need a biosboot partition,
>> yet a Fedora 16 Kickstart install fails with the known partitioning error
>> mentioned in bugzillas et al, unless I create one.
>>
>> What am I missing?
> I believe this logic applies only to Fedora 17. In Fedora 16, there was
> an attempt to have all systems using GPT (and thus some of them biosboot
> partition), unless you used 'nogpt' command line option. However it
> appeared that some systems have problems with such setups and thus
> aforementioned logic was introduced in Fedora 17.
>

I can confirm, with several installs on different systems, that the
decision tree David sent is working in Fedora 17 the way it should.

Fedora 16 didn't get used in our institution but the documentation
states that gpt is the default. May be you can solve your problem by
checking the distribution type you are installing and applying
appropriate partition options. So you don't have to depend on the
storage log file.

Richard