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Portable ZFSBootMenu

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Jip-Hop edited this page Mar 26, 2022 · 5 revisions

Portable ZFSBootMenu

It is possible to make ZFSBootMenu (or any other boot manager) portable on a UEFI-based system by ensuring that the desired executable EFI bundle is installed at /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI on the FAT-formatted EFI System Partition of the disk that you wish to use.

Step-by-Step

  1. Create a fresh GPT-formatted partition table on your target portable disk.

  2. Create within that a small partition with the correct GUID to mark it as an EFI System Partition.

  3. Format this partition as FAT.

  4. Copy the desired EFI bundle to /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI on this volume.

Notes

Alternatively you could format the entire disk (e.g. USB stick) as FAT32 with GUID Partition Table (GPT) and copy the EFI bundle (step 3 from above). Your system may still boot into ZFSBootMenu even though the partition wasn't marked as EFI System Partition.

With static installations, it is generally necessary to twiddle with a particular area of NVRAM on the system's BIOS (or, more properly, EFI) which contains a list of paths to EFI executables - this is what operating systems do as part of their setup procedure.

However, this is no use at all portability-wise for obvious reasons.

Fortunately, when a UEFI system attempts to boot from a non-volatile storage device directly rather than a pre-configured item in the boot list, it will search the EFI system partition on that device for /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI and execute it by default.

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