UEFI Solutions on BIOS: DUET and the Future of My Machine

[Mark]

I do not know if this is the proper place to ask this due to such specific tools being used. Notwithstanding, Sal's tech support community has never failed me and it's always my first choice! I will try to keep this short.

 

I have found a solution for running UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) on a motherboard that only supports BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). It requires installing SYSLINUX onto the hard drive on the ESP (EFI System Partition) and using SYSLINUX to boot DUET (Developer's UEFI Environment). UEFI will allow for the GPT (GUID Partition Table) layout to be utilized on hard disks on my machine. It is the key to using hard drives larger than two terabytes without requiring them be partitioned.

 

Say that the procedure goes as planned and I install Windows and start using my three terabyte hard disk as my main drive for a while. I will eventually buy a new motherboard which will have native UEFI support. When that happens, will I still be able to use my hard drive without the need for formatting or any data loss? The hard drive will stay GPT, so it will work with UEFI. The problem is that DUET will still be installed on it. Will I be able to safely remove SYSLINUX and DUET and continue using my hard drive with it's present Windows installation?

 

SYSLINUX an is obviously based on LINUX and I have never worked with LINUX before so I am unfamiliar with the shell prompt and if there are some obvious standard uninstall commands for applications/binaries/whatever.

 

Update: After some reading and thinking, I believe if SYSLINUX is remove, then DUET won't have to be since it isn't functional without a boot loader. However, if DUET is removed and SYSLINUX isn't, I'm guessing that SYSLINUX won't find anything to boot so I will be unable to start my computer. I've looked through the wiki pages for both of these projects and haven't found a way to uninstall them. I found one person who found a solution for removing SYSLINUX but it required deleting the partition. I can't delete the ESP because it is required for Windows to boot with UEFI. A solution might be to boot the Windows install with DUET being on a flash drive and then, once the install has completed, and Windows has automatically created the ESP (which the guide I'm using recommends to do if one gets errors related to the ESP partition, which means so far this is all possible), somehow back up the partition (copy it to another drive???) and then install DUET onto the hard drive. That way I could format the partition and put back the unaltered ESP when finished. I do not know if this is possible and how I'd go about the partition stuff (I haven't messed with it if you could not tell.) Perhaps I am being naïve and ambitious.

 

Update 2: This post list three possible ways of restoring a deleted ESP. The first and second don't seem to be of help, but the third one seems like an option. The guide I am using states that for Windows installations, bootmgfw.efi needs to be extracted onto the ESP anyways, though it isn't clear on which situations this needs to be done in. I understood it to be a requirement if I create the ESP rather than letting Windows take care of it. The problem with the third option in that external post is that the author seems unsure of what he is saying. I need to know that it can be safely removed so my data doesn't end up being inaccessible or corrupt. He states that files may need to be configured specifically for my OS. I have doubts that bootmgfw.efi will change, but I do think that other files in the partition are dependent on the install. I am also worried that perhaps that files on the ESP might change as I use my computer and not just during the installation of Windows 7. I'll need to know this and if I am right I'll also need to know all the files that Windows uses in the ESP, which files SYSLINUX and DUET use, and exactly what the SYSLINUX wiki means by "Installing SYSLINUX will alter the boot sector on the disk..."

Edited January 24, 2014 by Mark