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.