Arch Linux

ph9214

Member

Registered: 2017-09-08

Posts: 17

Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

Could I Install The Entire System (root directory and everything) onto a massive EFI Boot Partition (the fat32 one)?

and more practically I want to put a copy of the arch installer iso inside my EFI partition so i can boot from it to recover my system.

Last edited by ph9214 (2018-05-29 16:57:53)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,426

Re: Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

No, root on fat32 will not work. Permissions and filename restrictions won't work out.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,333

Website

Re: Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

Permissions would definitely be a problem, but Scimmia, do you have examples of filenames that would be a problem?  Fat32 is more limited for what is legal in filenames than most linux filesystems, but the file names of a base system are also conservative (no exotic characters, spaces, or very long names that I can think of).

As for the iso question, I don't know if an iso can be booted directly as a uefi appliance (I don't think it can) but most boot loaders would be capable of loading an iso from the ESP.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,426

Re: Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

If nothing else, many of the package tarballs themselves can't exist on fat32 since they include a ":" (epoch). Same would go for pacman's database of installed packages.

Last edited by Scimmia (2017-12-31 20:15:47)

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,426

Website

Re: Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

Please edit your thread title and remove the redundant [Dumb Question]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … ow_to_post

---

Arch + dwm   •   Mercurial repos  •   Surfraw

Registered Linux User #482438

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

Well maybe you could if you used UMSDOS. That was a way to install Linux in the 1990s where the Linux files were in a Windows partition, with some extra files that contained that Linux metadata such as permissions. It worked pretty well back then, so why would it not work today?

ph9214

Member

Registered: 2017-09-08

Posts: 17

Re: Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

There is an aur package that can install the systemresecue cd into the boot partition, so it should be possible to get the arch iso in the boot partition in a similar way

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/systemrescuecd

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,333

Website

Re: Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

You've had 5 months to update the thread title.  Please do so now.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

ph9214

Member

Registered: 2017-09-08

Posts: 17

Re: Whole System or Arch ISO On EFI Boot

I just did.