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relationship between MBR, GPT, UEFI
recently, i've encountered some disk related issues. it seems related to different boot record schemes and bios.
i admit my situation is rather convoluted but here it goes: i pulled a 2.5" laptop IDE harddrive(with winxp) from my broken thinkpad laptop and installed onto my desktop computer(with the help of an adapter). however I encountered 'error loading operating system' when trying to boot. after trying windows recovery console, reinstall the OS, changed bios settings etc to no avail, i updated the motherboard bios by downloading latest from manufacturer website. after bios update and reinstall the windowsXP, i could boot into windows. so i assumed i fixed the issue. then i tried to install Openindiana onto the same disk in different partition, to my surprise, the OI installer couldn't detect the hd even though bios shows it correctly. after troubleshooting for sometime, i discovered if i put the hd on secondary IDE channel on the motherboard, OI installer can detect the hd correctly and been installed. however, after OI installation finished, i couldn't boot into OI because the pc was caught in an endless boot loop. through thirty-party boot media, it appears that OI use GPT scheme on the boot record of the harddisk. afterwards, i added another SATA harddrive to the computer, then bios couldn't detect IDE HD anymore. SATA hd (with win7) works fine though. and i made sure the IDE support in bios is enabled. at this point, i'm really confused by the rather peculiar behavior of computer. I suspect this has something to do with bios support of MBR, GPT or UEFI but i'm pretty ignorant about GPT or UEFI. the motherboard is a MSI K8N Neo Platinum 754 NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb ATX AMD Motherboard. |
What "third party boot media" are you referring to?
I don't use UEFI but, from what I understand, if you are using GPT with windows you also need to install using UEFI. If you have multiple systems installed, they need to all be UEFI or all MBR. How old is this computer? You could google 'bootinfoscript' and download it and burn it to a CD and boot it. Just select the option to Create BootInfo Summary and post a link to it here as it will have details on your system which should get you some help. |
The laptop IDE disk will be jumpered as "master". Not a good idea to have two masters on the one interface - might explain why moving it helped (a little).
I would doubt OI would force gpt - but I've seen the Win10 preview do it, so anything is possible. Show us the bootinfo data as requested - and make sure you document at what stage it was taken; i.e what disk(s) was in which interface. |
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i've been doing some distro hopping lately. so I constantly swap in/out different harddisks on my desktop pc. here are the setup: 1. 640G SATA hd (win7/debian7 dual boot) 2. 10G IDE hd (OI -> Voidlinux) 3. 30G 2.5" IDE hd (win2k/FreeBSD10.1 dualboot -> FreeBSD10.1) 4. 80G 2.5" IDE hd (winxp -> winxp/OI dual boot) originally only the SATA harddrive was installed on the pc, I pulled it out to swap in other harddisk. 10G IDE hd with OI couldn't boot on the pc, so I installed voidlinux on it. 30G/80G 2.5" IDE were pulled from my broken thinkpads and had OS installed before, 30G with win2k/FreeBSD both OS can still boot in desktop; 80G with Xp can't boot with 'error loading OS', so I updated desktop bios and reinstalled winxp and installed OI as well. after bios update, I noticed 2.5 IDE disk with FreeBSD could't load, reports error: 'mounting from ufs://dev/ada0s2a failed with error 19'. so I wiped it clean and reinstalled FreeBSD on it. on 10G hd, when I tried to remove OI and install voidlinux, voidlinux installer(i.e. 3rd party boot media) reports the disk has GPT scheme and can't overwrite it, so I had to use a winXP cd to remove the partition first then install voidlinux. the voidlinux USB installer was labeled as 'Grub_UEFI' when created by 'win32diskimage'. none of the IDE hard drive was recognized by new bios when SATA is installed on the PC. so i'm lost as to what to make of all these, since GPT and UEFI are relatively new development and I don't know much about them. the desktop pc I have is a 10 yrs old homebuilt pc with the aforementioned MSI MB. |
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If the desktop you are having problems with is 10 years old, I don't think UEFI will play any role as it hasn't been commonly used for that long. To post more details with the bootinfoscript I suggested earlier or download the boot repair iso from the site below and run it then post the output.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair |
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