On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 11:50:02AM -0400, fsmithred wrote:
> 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.

It was an ASUS EEEPC -- the first one that needed no proprietary
device drivers. And it was possible the first model sold with
Windows only. How absurd.
>
> 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.

Laptop accesses the RAID via ethernet. The RAID is a Linux md
device, and uses multiple SATA connections on the server. No such
SATA connectons on the laptop. I might be able to connect SATA to
the laptop via USB adapters, but that way the boot-time dynamics are
starting to look completely different from what I'd have on the
server.

>
> 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.

There is an encrypted filesystem, but it is mounted only
occasionally, as needed. It's not relevant at boot time.

-- hendrik

>
> fsmithred
>
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