William Morder via tde-users wrote:
Regarding the efi partition: the one on my installed system, for the internal hard drive in my laptop, is only 60 mb. It is not a matter to how big, but rather whether I would use an entire flash drive (however small, say 8 or 10 gb) for only 60 mb. I don't usually see flash drives smaller than that nowadays. However, if I can partition a flash drive like a small portable system (which I have done before with a 64 gb flash drive, and put the efi partition on that, as well, then use this efi partition on the flash drive to boot my system even if using the OS installed on my actual machine, not the OS installed on my flash drive, then it would not be a complete waste of a flash drive.
You have (most likely) already an EFI partition on your Windows. And yes 60mb is perhaps also too big :) But I meant here putting the whole system on a USB stick to test if it works or reproduce the problem and look for solution without impacting your working env.
I hope this is clear, what I intend to say. And it is always convenient to be able to carry around an complete OS in my pocket, to be able to boot any machine, in an emergency, from that flash drive, and to use the hardware only a kind of temporary host. I did experiment with running my entire system from a flash drive, and using my machine's hard drive merely as temporary storage (keeping everything else on external hard drives), and actually, this worked pretty well, if just a little slow. But in the long run it did not work, because I think it was too much stress on the flash drive itself, which eventually got corrupted and became unusable.
Yes, they wear out pretty fast, but also the quality matters. However as rescue system or for testing it is pretty good choice.
To keep an OS (with all those partitons) on a flash drive just for emergency use, or sometime use when I am using another machine as a temporary host: that isn't a bad idea, though. I am just wondering, Can I use an efi partition -- installed on such a flash drive -- independently of the OS on that flash drive; in other words, to use that efi partition to boot the OS installed on my actual machine? To install a boot partition to an external source, such as a flash drive, is one of the installation options I get with Devuan, but I haven't tried this yet.
I guess it is possible. I think that the EFI passes the boot process to grub. or they both work together. I forgot already.