Re: Boot from 4TB USB jhard drive

[Andrei Borzenkov]

20.03.2016 02:18, Emilio Lazo Zaia пишет:
> Hello
> 
> I'm trying to boot off an WD MyBook 4TB disk (WDC WD40EZRX-00SPEB0) with
> GRUB2. The disk has the following partition schema:
> 
> ------
> GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.1
> 
> Partition table scan:
>   MBR: protective
>   BSD: not present
>   APM: not present
>   GPT: present
> 
> Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
> 
> Command (? for help): p
> Disk /dev/sdf: 976746240 sectors, 3.6 TiB
> Logical sector size: 4096 bytes
> Disk identifier (GUID): 117CB10C-C241-460D-AC03-A4F084CFA317
> Partition table holds up to 128 entries
> First usable sector is 6, last usable sector is 976746234
> Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
> Total free space is 2 sectors (8.0 KiB)
> 
> Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code Name
>    1               8             255   992.0 KiB   EF02 BIOS boot partition
>    2             256       976746234   3.6 TiB     8E00 Linux LVM
> ------
> 
> /boot partition is a logical volume within gpt2 partition. Partition 1
> has "legacy boot" flag. Except the 4KB sector size there is nothing
> strange.
> 
> After grub-install the disk boots under kvm with
> 
> $ kvm -snapshot -hda /dev/sdf
> 
> But in a non virtualized environment it hangs after selecting boot
> device from BIOS boot menu on the laptop (Acer AO722). There is no text,
> only the text cursor.
> 
> I've installed lilo and it hangs after "L" and extlinux shows "Multiple
> active partitions" but there is no active partitions on the protective
> MBR and only GPT partition 1 is "legacy boot bootable".
> 
> The problem is related to the physical sector size?
> 

That is quite possible. So far I have not heard of BIOS capable of
booting from 4Kn disks and even simply accessing such disks (when
booting from other media) did not work in cases known to me.

Are you willing to help in debugging it? Do you have possibility to boot
from other, more traditional, media, like CD/DVD or USB stick? Can you
compile GRUB with additional debug print enabled?