On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 1:11 PM, PYROcomp <[email protected]> wrote:
> http://www.jfwhome.com/2009/08/06/perfect-ubuntu-jaunty-on-the-asus-eeepc-1005ha-and-1008ha/
>
> You need to keep the EFI partition!
Sort of. According to the blog, you need it if you want to take
advantage of the "Boot Booster" feature.
<quote>
The EFI partition is for the Asus Boot Booster feature. It needs to be
8MB — I made it 16 just to be sure. At boot time, BIOS information is
cached in this little partition so that the power-on self test can be
bypassed. It speeds up the boot process by several seconds, which I
think is great.
</quote>
My fundamental question was, will my machine still boot if the EFI
partition gets removed/damage?
So, I did a series of small tests, which eventually left me with the
confidence that I could boot from the USB drive without the EFI
partition.
For a full test, I imaged all the important data then blew all the
partitions away by booting from a USB drive and running this:
sudo dd if=/dev/sda count=1 of=sda.mbr.img
sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 bs=1M of=sda2.img
sudo dd if=/dev/sda3 bs=1M of=sda3.img
for i in /dev/sda* ; do
sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1 of=${i}
done
echo w | sudo fdisk /dev/sda
I then powered down, unplugged the USB drive, and powered up. As
expected, not only could I not boot into Windows, but I also could not
perform a system recovery (F9).
So, I booted from the USB drive again and ran this:
sudo dd of=/dev/sda if=sda.mbr.img
echo w | sudo fdisk /dev/sda
sudo dd of=/dev/sda2 bs=1M if=sda2.img
I then powered down, unplugged the USB drive, and powered up.
Although I could not boot into Windows, I was able to perform a system
recovery, after which I was able to boot into Windows.
Now that I knew how to safely blow away and restore my original
system, I removed only the EFI partition and rebooted again.
Everything worked just fine.
BTW, the USB drive was running Ubuntu Lucid UNR.
Regards,
- Robert
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