GUID Partition Table

And also there's greater support for large boot drives.

If you have over two terabytes that you wanna boot directly from, uh uefi is what you'll be using now in that same vein you'll probably want to use GPT.

And what that means is that's the partition table.

So when you first plug in your drive, you'll get a prompt that says, hey, do you want GPT or MBR? Sometimes it's DOS and Linux.

MBR is kind of how Windows refers to it.

But you'll get those prompts.

And if it's a large drive, it needs to be GPT.

Otherwise, the largest partition you can make is two terabytes.

Then that tiny thing chain loads a second stage from somewhere else.

The gap after the MBR, a volume boot record, or on a GPT disk, a dedicated GRUB BIOS boot partition.

440 bytes.

That's your operating system's first breath.

Every encrypted laptop that asks for a passphrase is asking because the initramfs got far enough to ask

Now GRUB versus System Boot, because this is where the philosophical split lives

GRUB does everything: BIOS and UEFI, MBR and GPT, built-in support for RAID, LUKS, and LVM, though not thin-provisioned volumes.

System Boot is UEFI only.

Uh, he says, "Notes, though, for MBR installation.

NetBSD is [chuckles] notorious for its portability and being able to work in 'old computers.' I decided to do the installation in an HP Pavilion around 2012 that uses MBR instead of the GPT partitioning scheme found in modern UEFI systems." Um, he says, "Quick digression.

Many of the so-called obsolete or old computers are still useful and perform very well.

You just need a good operating system, wink.

I'd say back in the day, I used to remember this by thinking that WD stood for Western Digital, even [laughs] though you might have an IDE drive from someone else.

Anyway, um, so he's showing sysctl space hw.disknames, and he's got all of the disk names listed out there that, uh, on his system.

So i-in this example, he's got, uh, an IDE hard drive, an IDE CD-ROM, uh, sd0, which would be the USB pen drive, and finally the dk0 and dk1, which are wedges, aka GPT partitions that belong to sd0.

And he's got a bit of a diagram there.