On 06/10/2017 08:22 AM, Hendrik Boom wrote:
>
> I have a old laptop with an EFI partition, but it has the old-style
> MBR partitioning structure. The EFI partition was there when it was
> new, together with a Windows XP system (which is no longer there).
>
> As far as I've been able to tell, the contents of that partition is
> garbage. It wasn't even a valid FAT-style file system, as is (or
> used to be?) required by specs.
>
> -- hendrik
> _______________________________________________

That might be a good place to practice. If it's HP, you need to do special
things (bootloader must be named Microsoft-something-or-other). If it's
not HP, it still might not be made according to specs. But in theory, you
should be able to wipe the hard drive and install from the devuan
installation media.

I don't know if you would be able to plug your raid array into the laptop
and boot from the installed grub. I suppose if you're using uuid to
identify drives, it could work. Knowing that you could do that in an
emergency might give you some peace of mind.

The efi partition should be fat32 with boot and esp flags. 200mb is more
than enough (unless your uefi firmware doesn't like it.) The grub-install
command (with no device named) knows what to do with it. If you use an
encrypted filesystem, you'll still need another partition for /boot.

fsmithred