I just bought a gently used laptop and I am trying to figure out why this is. It has a single SSD that when running fdisk -l shows as Disk: /dev/sda. Under it though are 5 "devices" under that disk, each can only be partitioned to the imposed limits on the "device" Eg: /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 etc…
It used to be a Windows 8 machine before I tried it and despised everything it stood for, so I am trying to load Arch Linux on it at the moment. Some of these devices range from 150MB to 267GB. The MOBO is UEFI which is new to me, the Arch boot loader wants me to create the boot partition with something other than fdisk, FAT32. They recommend at least 500MB for the boot partition which seems absurdly expensive for a boot partition, but I digress. I wanted to make one of these 200MB devices the boot partition as FAT32, the 20GB device as my root partition in ext4, and the 265GB device as a single partition with a number of logical volumes each ext4 for /var /tmp and /home.
There isn't a single device on this disk that I want to use for boot that is quite 500MB and I don't want to share the 20GB device by splitting it into separate partitions for boot and root. If I use the whole 20GB device for just /boot however it would seem an unfortunate waste.
Is it possible to create the /boot partition as a logical volume on the larger device? Is there anything I would have to worry about with regards to UEFI and Gummiboot on Arch Linux?
Best Answer
No.
UEFI Bios tries to find a partition in a GPT-partitioned boot device. This partition needs to be tagged with "EFI System" (see fdisk's "t" command for all options) and also needs to be formatted with FAT filesystem.
You'll find a good explanation here...