IBM 88553RX, Installation Manual

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IBM
Eserver
xSeries 455 Planning and Installation Guide
scsi_mod 229248 6 [usb-storage sg sr_mod ide-scsi
mptscsih sd_mod]
Partitions on IA-64 Linux
The EFI system implements a new way to work with partitions. That means that
the IA-32 tools to manage partitions on Linux may not work properly. For
example, if you run
fdisk to see the content of a partition or disk, you do not see
the real content of the disks. Modifying this partition can destroy the Linux
installation.
Example 4-5 shows the fdisk output for our test partitions. We had two arrays
RAID level 1, each per server, configured on the system: One to run Linux, and
the other to run Windows 2003 Server.
Example 4-5 fdisk output of two EFI partitions
Disk /dev/sda: 18.1 GB, 18117296128 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2202 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 2203 1 ee EFI GPT
Disk /dev/sdb: 18.1 GB, 18117296128 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2202 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 2203 1 ee EFI GPT
Disk /dev/sdc: 262 MB, 262144000 bytes
16 heads, 32 sectors/track, 1000 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 512 * 512 = 262144 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 999 255728 6 FAT16
The two disks included more than one partition. In fact, there were at least three
partitions on each: One for EFI, one for the operating system boot images, and
another for the data. As you can see in the example, fdisk does not see any of
these partitions, but only a big partition of type EFI GPT.
Tip: In our case the third partition (sdc) is a USB 256 MB memory key.