What is EFI? Or more importantly, what does EFI do? The new Asus eeepc 1005hab that I got has a hard drive that looks like this:
$ sudo fdisk -clu /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x845a4551 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 40965749 20482843+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 302246910 312496379 5124735 1c Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sda3 312496380 312576704 40162+ ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32) The machine comes with Windows XP. /dev/sda1 is where WinXP is installed. sda2 has a Ghost image and files necessary to reinstall XP. Notice that /dev/sda3 is labeled as an EFI partition. What does that mean? I've been reading about EFI and it sounds interesting, but I can't find the answers to my questions. It seems to sit between the BIOS and the OS. Is it an extension to BIOS? Does the machine need the EFI partition in order to boot or can I remove it? That is, if I wipe the drive while installing Ubuntu will the machine become unbootable? Can I move the partition elsewhere? Does EFI enable certain hardware functions and, if so, how do I access them? Is EFI just an alternative to a boot loader, e.g. Grub? What I've read so far: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/ Thanks in advance for any pointers that clarify what EFI does and what I can do with it. Regards, - Robert -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
