Arch Linux

bjorntj

Member

Registered: 2011-05-10

Posts: 150

EFI System Partition?

What is an EFI System Partition? Is this what I should use as /boot or? I am a bit confused..... :-|
And it should be 200MB using FAT32?

Regards,

BTJ

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Someone wrote:
"I understand that if you play a Windows CD backwards you hear strange Satanic messages"
To which someone replied:
"It's even worse than that; play it forwards and it installs Windows"

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: EFI System Partition?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_System_partition
If you're on a Mac, there are some articles on the wiki e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IM … ilesystems or https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … N_in_Linux and a bunch of threads on the forums.

Where to install /boot - read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IM … Apple_uses
They all say it should be 200 MB FAT32.

Last edited by karol (2011-05-24 04:27:56)

twl

Member

Registered: 2011-05-30

Posts: 20

Re: EFI System Partition?

I'm still struggling with this EFI stuff myself.

I have the ASRock E350M1, which uses UEFI instead of BIOS. Also have a Areca ARC-1222 which manages the Raid 6 volume I was attempting to install Arch to.

I spent like 2 days trying to figure how to install a boot loader that would work with this motherboard.

I created a 200MB Fat32 Partition using gdisk and set it's type to 0xEF, and attempted to install arch using the latest Archboot

During the Archboot installation, when time came to install the boot loader, I selected EFI x86_64, hoping things would just work.

When I rebooted, the mobo reported that there were no bootable devices.

So what eventually made it work for me was to ignore the EFI stuff all together and create a 1MB partition and flag it bios_grub. Then when installing Archboot, I had it install standard grub2 bootloader and not EFI. I needed grub2 for GPT support.

Last edited by twl (2011-05-30 20:37:33)