Working with GPT Disks
As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the Itanium platform uses a new disk partitioning scheme called GUID Partition Tables, or GPTs. This new scheme was developed to address several shortcomings of the classic MBR approach:
An MBR disk can have only four primary partitions.
The maximum partition size is limited by a truncated Cylinder/Head/Sector geometry notation.
There is no coordination between the various partition schemes. This causes a problem for disk utility vendors who must anticipate how a particular scheme will align with cylinder boundaries for both bare disks and virtual disks presented by RAID controllers.
MBR disks have spawned a generation of utilities and operating systems that use hidden sectors containing ...
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