UEFI boot + 2nd partition
Posted: 24 Nov 2015, 12:37
I am building a USB stick to boot Porteus 64 and then run VirtualBox VMs off it. This setup works and it will be used with a number of different computers.
In another thread Ed_P brought up the idea that I should put Porteus on a FAT32 partition and make the stick bootable also on UEFI systems. I've tested that and it does work. However, FAT32 partitions support only files up to 4GB so I would have to put the VM .vdi files (some of which are much bigger) on a second partition (which could be any filesystem that supports big files, say ext3).
In theory that's no big deal but in practice I see a problem: VirtualBox seems to store the locations of .vdi files as absolute paths. As long as those files reside in a folder on the same partition as Porteus (say sdb1) that's fine because then the partition is not really necessary and is not stored. However, if they are on a different partition (say sdb2), then VirtualBox will store the path with sdb2 in it, I think. If I boot the stick now on a different machine where Porteus is, say, on sdc1 and the .vdi files are on sdc2, VirtualBox won't find them.
I could edit the VirtualBox configuration if necessary but surely there's a more elegant solution?! Perhaps a tiny FAT32 partition only for /boot and then a second partition with the rest of Porteus and VirtualBox and the .vdi files? (The fact that Windows normally can't access more than one partition on USB sticks is of no importance here.)
Or perhaps there's something even better?
In another thread Ed_P brought up the idea that I should put Porteus on a FAT32 partition and make the stick bootable also on UEFI systems. I've tested that and it does work. However, FAT32 partitions support only files up to 4GB so I would have to put the VM .vdi files (some of which are much bigger) on a second partition (which could be any filesystem that supports big files, say ext3).
In theory that's no big deal but in practice I see a problem: VirtualBox seems to store the locations of .vdi files as absolute paths. As long as those files reside in a folder on the same partition as Porteus (say sdb1) that's fine because then the partition is not really necessary and is not stored. However, if they are on a different partition (say sdb2), then VirtualBox will store the path with sdb2 in it, I think. If I boot the stick now on a different machine where Porteus is, say, on sdc1 and the .vdi files are on sdc2, VirtualBox won't find them.
I could edit the VirtualBox configuration if necessary but surely there's a more elegant solution?! Perhaps a tiny FAT32 partition only for /boot and then a second partition with the rest of Porteus and VirtualBox and the .vdi files? (The fact that Windows normally can't access more than one partition on USB sticks is of no importance here.)
Or perhaps there's something even better?