Re: Guidance on conflicts between GNU GRUB and proprietary software

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 02:51:01AM -0700, Bogdan wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 02:10:20AM -0700, Bogdan wrote:
> > Yes, which is the only thing that will fit into the boot sector which
> > needs to read everything else.
> 
> I disagree. You have more than enough space for both EDD and conventional INT 
> 13h. If you're thinking about something like ATA/ATAPI, sure, that's just crazy. 
> Then, you chainload the boot sector of the GRUB partition and that does all the 
> work that's necessary. If, for whatever reason, EDD is not available, the only 
> sane thing to do is to move all partitions to the end of the disk and have the 
> GRUB partition first (yes, I'm aware that's slow but at least it's sane).

EDD is still INT 13h, last I checked - just function 42h rather than 2h.
We use that.  Nevertheless, we still get occasional reports of problems
due to BIOS limitations.

> > It rather depends on the pattern of free space that's available;
> > consider for example the case where there's already a logical partition
> > but there is another primary partition between it and the space you
> > actually want to use.  The precise details are off-topic for this list,
> > though.
> 
> Here too, you can just move partitions around a bit (the same comment as above 
> applies).

Moving partitions in an OS installer as a prerequisite for actually
working properly (which is a large part of what I care about given my
work on Debian and Ubuntu) is far too unsafe, especially if the size of
the partition exceeds half the size of the disk, as it often will.
Users can of course ask for it if they're clueful, but clueful users are
unlikely to run into this problem in the first place!

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]