UEFI, thumb drives and multiple hard drives
My comptuter is UEFI enabled, with GPT partitioned drives.
Setting up Kubuntu 14.04 64bit on this machine was a breeze.
I don't have any windows. (very handy if I want to throw stones
)
I recently came across some information which I would like to have corroborated.
1.
After spotting some apparent 'problems' with one or two thumb drives that I own I began to do some experimenting.
I used Dolphin to examine the contents of the drives, but on occasion it seemed as if the drives were not there. In the same way that a thumb drive which has been unmounted can no longer be seen by dolphin.
I was also using gdisk, gparted and kde partition manager to diagnose the drives. At different times in different modes one application would find errors whereas another would give a clean bill of health. 'Correct' the 'errors' and the other application would complain.
Here, I think, is the problem. I had partitioned the thumb drives as GPT, thinking I was bringing them into line with my system. I believe that it was this act that was behind the problems. I read very recently that thumb drives should be left MSDOS partitioned, even with a UEFI system. So I used gdisk to zap the GPT partitioning on them and returned them to MSDOS partitioning with a FAT32 partition using KDE partition manager. I am hoping they will now return to functioning as reliably as they used to.
2.
The second bit of 'knowledge' I acquired from Google, yet again. It concerns the partitioning of hard drives and SSD's, on a UEFI machine.
My Google source suggests that each hard drive should ideally have a roughly 500M FAT32 partition at its start. Interestingly I set this type of partition up on each of the drives of a machine I was about to install with Kubuntu 14.04. After the install, with no bidding from myself, Kubuntu had adopted each partition and populated it with efi files. So apparently the system expected those partitions. I am not knowledgeable enough to know how these partitions fit into the bigger picture and if or when I might need to address them.
3.
The third pearl of Google wisdom.
On each hard drive with a GPT partion table, so Google told me, every partition should have empty trailing and leading spaces, something to do with system housekeeping.
I do leave a lead and trail space of 1-2M at beginning and end of a hard drive but maybe the need for these spaces is a myth?
Setting up Kubuntu 14.04 64bit on this machine was a breeze.
I don't have any windows. (very handy if I want to throw stones
)I recently came across some information which I would like to have corroborated.
1.
After spotting some apparent 'problems' with one or two thumb drives that I own I began to do some experimenting.
I used Dolphin to examine the contents of the drives, but on occasion it seemed as if the drives were not there. In the same way that a thumb drive which has been unmounted can no longer be seen by dolphin.
I was also using gdisk, gparted and kde partition manager to diagnose the drives. At different times in different modes one application would find errors whereas another would give a clean bill of health. 'Correct' the 'errors' and the other application would complain.
Here, I think, is the problem. I had partitioned the thumb drives as GPT, thinking I was bringing them into line with my system. I believe that it was this act that was behind the problems. I read very recently that thumb drives should be left MSDOS partitioned, even with a UEFI system. So I used gdisk to zap the GPT partitioning on them and returned them to MSDOS partitioning with a FAT32 partition using KDE partition manager. I am hoping they will now return to functioning as reliably as they used to.
2.
The second bit of 'knowledge' I acquired from Google, yet again. It concerns the partitioning of hard drives and SSD's, on a UEFI machine.
My Google source suggests that each hard drive should ideally have a roughly 500M FAT32 partition at its start. Interestingly I set this type of partition up on each of the drives of a machine I was about to install with Kubuntu 14.04. After the install, with no bidding from myself, Kubuntu had adopted each partition and populated it with efi files. So apparently the system expected those partitions. I am not knowledgeable enough to know how these partitions fit into the bigger picture and if or when I might need to address them.
3.
The third pearl of Google wisdom.
On each hard drive with a GPT partion table, so Google told me, every partition should have empty trailing and leading spaces, something to do with system housekeeping.
I do leave a lead and trail space of 1-2M at beginning and end of a hard drive but maybe the need for these spaces is a myth?
If you're thinking about the one that appears when you press a certain function key and then presents a series of hardware setup menus, the correct term is firmware settings. Historically, this was called "entering the BIOS" because that was the only kind of firmware available. It's a sloppy substitute, and technically incorrect: you aren't "entering" anything but instead operating configuration menus. But the meaning was conventionally understood because there was no alternate firmware. Today, "entering the BIOS" isn't actually possible on a modern machine, because there is no BIOS. "Enter the UEFI" would be similarly sloppy and technically incorrect for the same reason: you're manipulating configuration menus. Interestingly, if you take the time to install the EFI shell in your EFI system partition, and then boot this shell, you'd be much closer to "entering the UEFI" than was ever possible with BIOS.
Comment