munky Posted September 27, 2006 Share Posted September 27, 2006 Hi, I'm going to be setting up a RAID mirror on my hackintosh to act as 'safer' storage for my Aperture library. Since I wont be booting from these disks, I guess I am free to go with non-MBR partitioning, if I want to. Does anyone have any experience of GPT or APM disks on a hackintosh? Is there any advantage over MBR? Does it even work? If not, I might just try it anyway. I'll post my results... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
letni Posted September 27, 2006 Share Posted September 27, 2006 GTP disks are kind of like dynamic disks. The idea behind GTP disks are you can have volumes over 2TB in size, which is a limit with MBR disks. AFAIK, only windows 2003 SP1 is able to use/boot off of drives marked with GTP, so having a GTP disk might prevent you from booting a HFS+ partition (MacOS). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouch Posted September 27, 2006 Share Posted September 27, 2006 Intel macs require that the boot disc be GPT. Not sure what was supported on the developer released. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted September 27, 2006 Author Share Posted September 27, 2006 Well, as I said I wont be booting from these disks - i'm turning them into a RAID mirror set. Does anyone know if GPT will give any advantage over MBR for this purpose? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
enb14 Posted September 27, 2006 Share Posted September 27, 2006 Advantages: MBR only writes the information on track 0 GPT writes at the begining and at the end of the disk for backup purposes MBR only supports 4 primary partitions GPT 32 (Correct me if I'm wrong) Other advantages that you wont see are that you can boot from any GPT partition without any boot loader. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted September 27, 2006 Author Share Posted September 27, 2006 enb14 - thanks for the info. having absorbed your info, and having dug a little deeper, it sounds like GPT might be the way to go: 5. Is EFI required for a GPT disk?No. GPT disks are self-identifying. All the information needed to interpret the partitioning scheme of a GPT disk is completely contained in structures in specified locations on the physical media. So that means it should work just fine on a Hackintosh. Also, as you said: GPT disks use primary and backup partition tables for redundancy and CRC32 fields for improved partition data structure integrity. Definitely sounds like it'll be more reliable. Thanks, I think i'll go with a GPT-based RAID1 setup Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
enb14 Posted September 28, 2006 Share Posted September 28, 2006 Well done munky, you have explained a little bit more about EFI and GPT, I was trying to create an USB 10GB Hard Drive GPT but unfortunatelly it didn't work so I'm gonna try more tests on this area Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted September 28, 2006 Author Share Posted September 28, 2006 I have a whole bunch of data I need to relocate before I can wipe the disks in readiness for RAID, but when I do it, i'll post my findings here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted October 2, 2006 Author Share Posted October 2, 2006 Update: I havent gone RAID yet, but I finished emptying one of the disks, so I erased it and set it up as a GPT disk with a single partition. Seems to be working fine, though I noticed that under GPT the formatted capacity is less - by a few hundred Mb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted October 12, 2006 Author Share Posted October 12, 2006 getting there... one of the disks is now empty.... data juggling takes time! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aberracus Posted October 12, 2006 Share Posted October 12, 2006 hahahha keep us posted! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
munky Posted October 15, 2006 Author Share Posted October 15, 2006 so it works as expected. i now have 160Gb of fully protected storage (RAID mirror), using GPT disks. sweet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blitzny Posted October 29, 2007 Share Posted October 29, 2007 i have been trying to install ox86 all day today, and somehow my disk became a GPT disk... Anyway to get it back to normal? (MBR)??? Please? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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