[Mageia-discuss] UEFI and Secure Boot

[Goh Lip]

On 08/21/2012 11:41 PM, Maurice Batey wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Aug 2012 22:48:51 +0800, Goh Lip wrote:
>
>> be careful installing on UEFI.
>
>    UEFI is  Disabled at the moment, and as I have no intention of
> Enabling it presumably none of the problems you point to applies.
>
> An interesting pre-Mageia install question is: If I were to Enable UEFI,
> who/what will re-organise the current Windows 7 installation as you
> describe to suit, and when?!
>


Maurice,

[1] GPT partitioning -
Most likely, your disk is GPT partitioned and windows 7 installed on it 
with at least 2 partitions (one for boot and probably one more for 
recovery besides the usual OS partition). As mentioned earlier, Windows 
7 (and Linux) will work on BIOS and GPT partitioning. As for enabling 
UEFI, windows 7 will work without 'redoing' the partitioning (if it is 
already GPT) but you may have to redo the boot (boot.ini? - but I really 
don't know for windows). You can try it out by enabling UEFI and check 
if it boots Windows 7 without any changes.

You can check if your disk is GPT partitioned by booting a livecd and at 
terminal (root), "fdisk -lu" If it is GPT, it will give an error message 
(nothing to worry about, fdisk won't work on GPT, that's all).

[2] Grub-legacy
First a disclaimer - I have not used grub-legacy for about 5 years, all 
my OS's boots/grubs are 'set' or 'installed' (wrong term, but that's 
what it's being used) to their own partitions, including Mageia's 
grub-legacy boot. And while I've used/tested GPT partitioning using 
BIOS, it is with grub2, not with grub-legacy, I am unsure if Mageia's 
grub-legacy could work with GPT and here's a link to help somewhat..
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/bios.html
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/booting.html

So please approach this with caution even though I am sure grub2 will 
definitely work with BIOS/GPT and will install alongside Windows 7's 
GPT/BIOS.

[3] Installation
I 'refound' this link that helped me (I don't have Sabayon) the most in 
this aspect.
http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Install_Sabayon_with_GRUB2_and_GPT_on_a_New_System

Watch out about 'labeling' and 'flagging' the partitions, and if you 
need to 'reset' the whole drive as GPT, also 'Create Partition Table' 
first. Oh, you'll need a separate 'boot' partition too.

Good luck - Goh Lip

ps: Note that I finally went back to msdos partitioning on my BIOS 
system as I found mixing GPT and MSDos drives (I have lots of external 
OS's, some iso boots) is incompatible and the main advantage for GPT on 
BIOS is for large (>2GB) drives; (though UEFI has way lots more benefits 
than BIOS itself).