On Saturday 05 Jan 2013 20:23:39 Mike Cloaked wrote:
I am building a machine which has an EFI capable boot on the motherboard together with an mSATA drive for the root and boot partitions and an SSD for the /opt and swap partitions, and just a single arch x86_64 install when it is built - no dual booting to other OSes. I have been looking up information about UEFI with GPT partitioning and have read about various problems that people have had with such systems.
So at this stage I am unsure whether to stick with what I know (BIOS/MBR and GRUB2 with full systemd) or whether to plunge into the unknown (for me!) and try EFI/GPT! (with rEFInd)
Does anyone have experience with such a UEFI system on this list? Apart from the info on the arch wiki and the install wiki info (which I have been reading), are systems like this reliable once installed? Does the routine pacman update process for kernels lead to issues requiring manual intervention with EFI/GPT or it is as generally reliable as BIOS/MBR?
I would be interested to hear from anyone with this kind of experience running arch - if it is useful the motherboard I am using is an Intel DQ77KB (which I intend to update with the latest BIOS firmware) and with the Intel i3-3220T CPU.
Thanks for any replies (and useful links)
I have a Dell Latitude E5520 in EFI-only mode. I set it up over a year ago now by simply following the wiki to set up GPT partitioning and Grub 2 for bootloading. I have three partitions: /boot, /boot/efi, and an LVM PV for the rest. I found it relatively straight-forward; I was actually a little surprised. Paul