I suspect the issue was more with UDev and those fancy new drives.  I just wiped then installed Arch on a brand new HP laptop with GPT, zero issues.  I especially like the lack of a separate /boot partition by reusing the EFI/GPT boot sector.

Personally, my install was very straightforward and stable as hell.

Kevin

On Dec 20, 2016 9:13 AM, "Michael Butash" <michael@butash.net> wrote:
I agree, this is why I keep separate /usr partitions, both to allow for growth, and to monitor my growth.  Another weird thing Arch has such a difficult time booting with a separate /usr, more like the dev's ass-u-me again no one will *ever* do this...

I started doing it as a means of checks for watching growth over the years.  In the old days of 8.04, usually a 4gb partition for /usr was fine, and less than a gig for actual root (/).  Now I fill /usr with at least 6gb of data on install it seems, 7-8gb is more the norm.

Use of GPT is/was really trying to keep up with tech, where early days of SSD, fdisk was terrible about alignment, where most things can and still do say to use GPT.  Just no one tells you it is inherently broken still on most platforms to consider booting off of.

I'd be more inclined to try EFI, but I'm fond of consistent raid approaches, even for boot partitions, where the inflexible FatFS nature of EFI partition just rubs me the wrong way as it can't be made natively redundant like I can with /boot being on mdraid partitions happily booting linux otherwise.  Curious what others do with redundancy around EFI desktop drives...

Even without another shed of M$ on here, it still finds a way to screw things up.

-mb

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:09 AM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
On Mon, 19 Dec 2016 23:17:38 -0700
Michael Butash <michael@butash.net> wrote:

> I really had no idea GPT was such an anomaly still.  Everything I
> read was like "just do it!".  Not.

At this point in time, laptop hard disks still aren't big enough to
require EFI, and desktops have multiple disks. So what I do on laptops
that can still do MBR is MBR format the hard disk.

With my daily driver desktop, with a 4TB disk, and a 3TB disk, and a
256GB SSD, I MBR boot to the SSD, which also contains the whole /usr
and /etc tree for easy bootability in these days of symlinked /usr. So
I get the advantages of GPT on my large disks, the simple booting of
MBR on my SSD: It works fast and beautifully.

SteveT

Steve Litt
December 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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