[lug] Conversion of BIOS Disks to UEFI (non-destructive)

[Zan Lynx]

On 4/26/19 1:52 PM, D. Stimits wrote:
> There is still one possible issue (I'm just wondering about this as a
> puzzle, not so much for practical use): When a GPT partition scheme disk
> is used as a boot disk there is extra firmware or boot support added to
> the front of the disk. Does converting to GPT reserve that space for
> making the disk bootable? Or would one still need to make further
> movements of partitions to allow room at the start of the disk?

For UEFI boot you need the EFI System Partition. It has to be formatted
as FAT. FAT32 usually. It has to be something simple because the
firmware needs to be able to read and write it.

Then if you want to dual boot Windows you also need a Microsoft Reserved
(MSR) partition of about 128 MiB.

>From what I've read about it some other things may also require a MSR
partition to use for stashing RAID data, dynamic disk (logical volume
management) identifiers and such, even if the software isn't Microsoft.

As far as I know, and from what I've read about it, it doesn't matter
where these partitions are on the disk so you can put them in wherever
they will fit.

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