[syslinux] Using syslinux on the PMBR of a GPT partition table

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Wed Nov 5 09:04:26 PST 2008


Stewart Adam wrote:
> 
> Just to give you some more debugging info, I tried creating a gptmbr.bin 
> file with the GPT GUID appended. The total file size was 460 bytes, which 
> according to Wikipedia sounds right ;)
> 

Except it should be 440 bytes.  I suspect you appended the partition
GUID as a text string, instead of in binary form.

> I copied it to /dev/sdb, but some things I found weird is that this time, 
> instead of showing a blank screen booting from the BIOS does fail with a 
> "Cannot find boot partition" message. As well, parted shows this message 
> when opening /dev/sdb:
> Warning: /dev/sdb contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT 
> table. However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it 
> should. <...>
>  
> I rebooted into OS X to check, and indeed it looks like something is wrong 
> with the GPT partition table:
> 
> # sudo diskUtil list /dev/disk1
> /dev/disk1
>     #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
>     0:                                                   *3.7 Gi     disk1
> 
> I'm going to try to create a GPT layout within OS X and then copy the Live 
> OS onto that partition to see if that helps.

This is because you overwrote the fake MBR.

	-hpa




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