Sunday, January 16, 2022

Both Debian 11 and Ubuntu 21.10 Need ESP Partition

My PC with 120 SSD Hard disk is set up with Legacy BIOS and the new  Debian 11 was installed without a problem.

My Home partition is never formated so all my old data are saved.

I tried installing Debian and Ubuntu on one terabyte Seagate External Disk with Fat partition as the first boot partition and I could not boot it after installing Debian.

I ignored the Debian flashing at boot time, it is now supporting UEFI.

UEFI is a ploy by Microsoft to scuttle dual booting Linux in your PC.

The ploy I used overcome this problem was to go back to Legacy BIOS.

UEFI stands for Universal Extensible Firmware Interface.

Linux does not use the term UEFI but has renamed, it as ESP.

For a long time Ubuntu and Debian could not overcome this problem of UEFI but now they have their own solutions to this problem.

Back a few years ago, when I had this problem with my Windows Laptop which I erased everything and I used True OS to erase and mount an ESP partition and boot Debian subsequently.

TRUE OS is No more and it's follower FREE-NAS has no desktop.

Attempt of using Debian ESP was a failure.

Then I used Endless OS to erase everything.

Unfortunately Endless OS does not let you dual boot and using one terabyte SATA disk for Endless OS was an absolute waste of resources.

I removed the one terabyte disk and put a 120GB SATA and reinstalled Endless OS.

I have another problem and there are no DVDs in this city to write an ISO image. Debian 11 does not support bootable USB but Ubuntu does.

I have lot of USBs and all have bootable OSes.

The only USB that did not boot a graphic desktop was BSD.

I formated it.

Downloaded Ubuntu 21.10.

Made a bootle ISO image on a 4GB USB stick, using the Debian PC.

Mounted Ubuntu and installed Ubuntu on the External Disk without a ESP partition.

While I was doing this I got a message saying that it won't boot without ESP partition.

I reinstalled Ubuntu with ESP partition.

Presto it is booting.

ESP partition is only 300MB.

I am currently booting Debian and expecting it to write the boot loader in the ESP partition.

I have 800 GB free space left in my external disk.

Perhaps I will boot Emmabuntus on this free space, on a later date.

I have to download Emmabuntus first.


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