UEFI vs BIOS I give up ( A Rant)

[rs55]

I have wanted to have a fully installed Linus OS on a thumb drive - not a "live-usb" , but a fully installed OS - like on the hard drive. I have a high end Corsair GTX which has an SSD controller - so looks like a hard drive and is blazing fast.
My own machines are all on Legacy Bios. And I have quite a few.
I wanted to have this usb drive work on a friend's machine - on the off chance I was ever in a position with no laptop of my own. No luck.

The more I dig into UEFI - the more I dislike it. After 30 years of personal computer sales - all these mega companies have not found an elegant solution to simply handoff the bootup to the OS. Nope. Its ugly, its inconsistent, its cat's vomit.

I have also taken to getting rid of pulse-audio and network-manager. I much prefer the simplicity of alsa and wicd.

"New improved " does not mean improved. Well at least they get one point for "new" I guess.

Dont I feel the need to make sure my system is really up to date ? No- I - dont. I use my systems - a lot . i depend on them. I want them to be clean, fast and functiional - and most importantly ..... Predictable. Like my washing machine , or home heating system.


Moreover - by the time some genius figures out how to make a simple boot-handoff piece of code - probably takes 100KB of code to do this - we'll be well beyond laptops and on to the next hardware platform anyway. So , no - i dont bother myself with having to stay up-to-date . And that old BIOS works fine - as it was 40 years ago.

[rs55]

I have stockpiles a bunch of thinkpads circa 2011. because I think the PC has gone backwars since then, just look at that ridiculous spectacle clled Windows 10 . just saw an article warning that the latest update makes the file manger fail to ... well... manage files !!

The hardware has been dumbed down, politically-correctified - gutting the power for some miniscule power savings. The machines are not easy to repair or upgrade.
The soft ware is worse. With the exception of Debian , and MX Linux .
Much worse.
The spying, the ads, the intrusions, the fear-mongering about "viruses" by viruses(like Windows10) is sort of hilarious in an Orwellian sense.

Dumbed down hardware, dumbed down and dysfunctional software. Becasue after all , what are the peasants going to do? Revolt?

[Stevo]

Is this the right forum section for rants that have nothing to do with MX?

[fehlix]

I have wanted to have a fully installed Linus OS on a thumb drive - not a "live-usb" , but a fully installed OS - like on the hard drive. I have a high end Corsair GTX which has an SSD controller - so looks like a hard drive and is blazing fast.
My own machines are all on Legacy Bios. And I have quite a few.
I wanted to have this usb drive work on a friend's machine - on the off chance I was ever in a position with no laptop of my own. No luck.

Hmm.. actually you should have posted this into the help forum under "Setting up a full installed Linux OS onto a thumbdrive capable to boot both UEFI and BIOS mode" ...
As by some coincidence I just setup such a USBstick at the last weekend with having multiple MX Linux (MX -19, MC-18.3 and antiX-19) installed and this stick boot in UEFI mode and BIOS mode.
So as you tried already, please simply tell us where you got stuck... perhaps we might help you to get this running...

[JayM]

The traditional BIOS still has serious limitations. It can only boot from drives of 2.1 TB or less. 3 TB drives are now common, and a computer with a BIOS can’t boot from them. That limitation is due to the way the BIOS’s Master Boot Record system works.

The BIOS must run in 16-bit processor mode, and only has 1 MB of space to execute in. It has trouble initializing multiple hardware devices at once, which leads to a slower boot process when initializing all the hardware interfaces and devices on a modern PC.

https://www.howtogeek.com/56958/HTG-EXP ... -THE-BIOS/

Like it or not, UEFI is here to stay. It's called "progress".

(Note: the above article is 2 years old. 4TB and larger drives are now common and also can't be booted in legacy-BIOS systems.)

[fehlix]

The traditional BIOS still has serious limitations. It can only boot from drives of 2.1 TB or less. 3 TB drives are now common, and a computer with a BIOS can’t boot from them. That limitation is due to the way the BIOS’s Master Boot Record system works.

The BIOS must run in 16-bit processor mode, and only has 1 MB of space to execute in. It has trouble initializing multiple hardware devices at once, which leads to a slower boot process when initializing all the hardware interfaces and devices on a modern PC.

https://www.howtogeek.com/56958/HTG-EXP ... -THE-BIOS/

Like it or not, UEFI is here to stay. It's called "progress".

(Note: the above article is 2 years old. 4TB and larger drives are now common and also can't be booted in legacy-BIOS systems.)

That quote is not correct. (or simply wrong) Grub can boot from any GPT disk within BIOS(MBR) mode. Most people seem to get confused about UEFI /BIOS and MBR (DOS) / GPT partition table theme.

[JayM]

That quote is not correct. (or simply wrong) Grub can boot from any GPT disk within BIOS(MBR) mode. Most people seem to get confused about UEFI /BIOS and MBR (DOS) / GPT partition table theme.

It was probably talking about Windows bootloaders.

[fehlix]

That quote is not correct. (or simply wrong) Grub can boot from any GPT disk within BIOS(MBR) mode. Most people seem to get confused about UEFI /BIOS and MBR (DOS) / GPT partition table theme.

It was probably talking about Windows bootloaders.

MS introduced this artifical limitation of not allowing WinOS to install in MBR mode to boot from GPT. Well I have installed WInOS10 in BIOS mode on a this GPT disk, which I have running here ;=) It's a 4TB disk with multiple Linux all in MBR (NON-UEFI).
For GRUB to boot in BIOS/MBR from a GPT disk, one needs simply add an 1MB (unformatted) partition marked as bios_grub - preferable at the beginning of the disk, so BIOS can better find it....

[rs55]

I have wanted to have a fully installed Linus OS on a thumb drive - not a "live-usb" , but a fully installed OS - like on the hard drive. I have a high end Corsair GTX which has an SSD controller - so looks like a hard drive and is blazing fast.
My own machines are all on Legacy Bios. And I have quite a few.
I wanted to have this usb drive work on a friend's machine - on the off chance I was ever in a position with no laptop of my own. No luck.

Hmm.. actually you should have posted this into the help forum under "Setting up a full installed Linux OS onto a thumbdrive capable to boot both UEFI and BIOS mode" ...
As by some coincidence I just setup such a USBstick at the last weekend with having multiple MX Linux (MX -19, MC-18.3 and antiX-19) installed and this stick boot in UEFI mode and BIOS mode.
So as you tried already, please simply tell us where you got stuck... perhaps we might help you to get this running...

Thanks so much Fehlix. Sorry for the rant. Iam doing other stuff now, will post in a couple of days with some details.

[Eadwine Rose]

First off.. are you talking about installing MX or something else?

If it is something else it doesn't belong in this forum and needs moving.