Re: USB3 3TB HDD boot

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 18, 2013, at 3:46 PM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko 
<address@hidden> wrote:

> BIOS interfaces support up-to 64-bit LBA adressing so >2T is just issue
> of fixing bugs in BIOS.

Actually, as I think about it, >2TB with BIOS is a dead end for most of the 
market because Windows on BIOS requires MBR, and thus far there's no extension 
for MBR beyond 32-bit addressing. There's sort of a crude work around that can 
allow up to 4.4TB disks with MBR, requiring two partitions; since MBR specifies 
partitions with starting LBA and number of partitions rather than ending LBA. I 
don't know this yet, but I suspect this is how Apple has implemented 3TB 
support for CSM booting (totally ill advised in my opinion).

GRUB+Linux of course can use GPT in such a case, so long as the BIOS bugs are 
fixed to tolerate GPT (which some BIOS's notably Lenovo) the larger disk sizes 
are bootable.

Chris Murphy