roland
After learning a little about the UEFI system browsing the www, I find that most laptops made during the past 10 years expect UEFI system to be catered for in their booting arrangements. It does not seem to have made much inroad into the PC market yet.
UEFI seems to be the product of a latter day ‘Gang of Nine’ attempt to regulate boot management when multiple operating systems are present, one wonders if the Windows fraternity or related manufacturers are behind it, as it seems to do nothing that Grub does not do. I am not sure if UEFI excludes Grub or if Grub can function within the UEFI envelope, as the antiX installer offers either MBR or EFI as Grub install locations. It looks as if Grub code is embedded in UEFI files at some point during install.
A partition table conforming to either MS-Dos or GTP standards is suggested but GTP is recommended because of the greater number of partitions available. MS-Dos is limited to 4 (I always thought it was 3, maybe the the EFI partition is not counted ?). The EFI partition used as /boot will need to store about 30mb of code for each installed system. The recommended total size varies from 200mb to 500mb however (seems a lot of excess ?). It must be formatted Fat32 with EFI and Boot flags set. I created one of 256mb which has to be adequate (?).
I have created the partitions I thought appropriate for an install on this laptop including an EFI partition as above. The install fails formatting /root. I also tried leaving the installer to create partitions to chosen % for /root and /home, fails with an endless hang, I gave it 10 minutes or more. Htop showed little or no cpu activity throughout. The log shows no new activity after the necessary cleanup, so it’s doing nothing it seems?
Therefore I have to conclude that either I have missed something fundamental (most likely) or the installer does not handle partition preparation adequately, or maybe something is missing.
I think (my opinion only) that the installer should not attempt formatting any partition marked Retain, and this marker should be available for all classes of partition including /root, giving the user more flexibility and getting the installer straight into copying the new system across.
How can I run a bad block HD check independently of a partition format, when there is no system installed?
The attached screenshots show a bespoke install using partition table gtp, Efi partition 256mb with boot + EFI flags, Swap, /root ext4 and /home ext4, which fails formatting /root.
Also a default install with 12% /root and the rest /home, which hangs endlessly with no apparent activity.
- This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by roland.
