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Old dogs and new tricks springs to mind. I am building a new PC and what with |
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UEFI, APUs and SSDs, it feels like that the world has moved a long way since |
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the last time I had to install gentoo. |
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|
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I'll be taking my time to google, read and make appropriate selections, so |
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please bear with me while I start relevant threads as necessary to complement |
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my sparse knowledge in these topics. Starting from the top, with this thread |
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I am trying to find out what is considered good practice as far as UEFI/MBR |
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and boot management goes. |
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|
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The MoBo is capable of booting in CMS mode, but I am not sure if there are any |
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benefits in creating a 2MB partition for a conventional MBR bootloader, or I |
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should forego MBR altogether and go directly with a GPT FAT32 EFI System |
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Partition (ESP). |
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|
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If the latter is the way to go and I forget all things I ever learned about |
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MBR, does the 550MB FAT32 ESP partition have to be at the beginning of the |
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drive? |
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|
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Is it beneficial to install a Linux boot loader/manager like GRUB2, or rEFInd, |
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etc., or should I just use the kernel EFI Boot Stub to boot gentoo with? The |
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PC will single boot in Gentoo, although I may drop in a sysrescuecd image for |
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recovery purposes and would be nice to be able to boot this straight off the |
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disk, without having to burn it on a CDROM. Is it simply a matter of adding |
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the LiveCD iso in the ESP with a .efi suffix, or will I need to use efibootmgr |
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to inform the UEFI about *any* kernel images in the ESP other than the default |
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EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi? |
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|
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Finally, what's your opinion on 'secure boot'? I'm mostly thinking of its |
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benefit as a pre-boot malware protection utility, but I don't want to |
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introduce too much complexity which may make recovery of my data difficult in |
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the future. I've heard some horror stories resulting from NVRAM corruption, |
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or flashing with new UEFI firmware rendering the PC unbootable, etc. but don't |
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know if this is due to user error. If you have experience using secure boot |
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what is your preferred method? |
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|
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Any other pointers and gotchas I should be careful with? |
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|
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-- |
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Regards, |
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Mick |