Creating a partition for UEFI (Install Help)

Question

Hi everyone. I've been trying to search for an answer for this for a while and have came up blank. I'm ready to switch over to Arch Linux officially, after testing it in VirtualBox for a while. However, I'm a tad confused on some of the documentation for the partition setup for UEFI motherboards.
I understand partitioning can be more of a 'personal preference' type of thing, but was wondering if someone might be able to assist me in how it should be setup.....
Reading from https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … n_in_Linux, should I create the partition like so or should there be a separate boot partition for UEFI?
Should it be setup like this?
Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
sda1 Boot Primary Linux 15440 <-- FAT32 Filesystem for UEFI
sda2 Primary Linux swap / Solaris 1024
sda3 Primary Linux {rest of space}*
or like this...?
Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
sda1 Boot Primary Linux 15440
sda2 Boot Primary Linux 512 <-- FAT32 Filesystem for UEFI
sda3 Primary Linux swap / Solaris 1024
sda4 Primary Linux {rest of space}*
Additionally, secondary question, from the Beginners Guide, it has the following line for installing GRUB..
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=arch_grub --recheck
For "--efi-directory=/boot/efi" is this something that I will need to create manually? I saw some forum posts where people needed to place something in their bootable usb drive, but I'm using a Live Disk. Thanks.
Edit: Solved second question.
Last edited by Quill (2012-09-07 03:33:01)

Answer 1

After much research, I've found a lot more information on this. I'm going to take this approach I think..
Setup partitions like:
Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
sda1 Boot Primary Linux 15440
sda2 Primary Linux swap / Solaris 2048
sda3 Primary Linux {rest of space}*
After setting up file systems.. Then do this..
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot/efi
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
When installing GRUB..
# pacman -S grub-efi-x86_64
# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=arch_grub --recheck
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Can someone confirm if that is the correct setup? Also, as it states I need to make it a FAT32 Filesystem, will this affect anything if I have my entire boot partition on FAT32?
Last edited by Quill (2012-09-07 04:05:57)