Partitioning hard disk drives for BIOS-MBR, BIOS-GPT and UEFI-GPT in Linux

February 10, 2017 8 Comments

Introduction

This post was prompted by recent threads in the Gentoo Linux Forums such as the following:

‘partition MBR/GPT fdisk question‘ in which two people asked how to partition a HDD using GPT. One has a computer that only has BIOS firmware; the other has a computer with firmware that supports UEFI and BIOS (user-selectable) and who apparently wanted to boot using BIOS.
‘[SOLVED] installing on UEFI system‘ in which someone asked how to partition a HDD for a computer with UEFI firmware.

These Gentoo Linux users were confused by the instructions in the Gentoo Installation Guide – Preparing the disks. In my opinion the Gentoo Installation Guide is confusing. You do not need a BIOS boot partition (Code EF02) if you want to use a GPT-partitioned HDD with a UEFI computer; you only need a BIOS boot partition on a GPT-partitioned HDD if you want to use it with a BIOS computer. You do not need an ESP (EFI System Partition) if you want to use a GPT-partitioned HDD with a BIOS computer; you only need an ESP (Code EF00) — which must be formatted as FAT32 — if you want to use UEFI.

Coincidentally, recently an Ubuntu user also told me he finds GPT partitioning for UEFI confusing.

So, in the hope of helping people having trouble understanding how to partition a HDD for Linux, I decided to post some information on the two firmware designs and the two partitioning designs, plus list a few (of the many) partitioning schemes that can be used. The purpose of this post is to provide an overview of the designs and possible schemes, not to explain how to use the various partitioning tools or to list the precise steps you must follow. I have tried to avoid going into fine detail (for example the oft-quoted limit of 2TiB for MBR-partitioned HDDs is contigent on 512B sectors).

Firstly, let’s get the terminology straight: you should say ‘UEFI firmware’, not ‘UEFI BIOS’. The latter is an oxymoron. I know that some computer manufacturers and third-party firmware providers use the term ‘UEFI BIOS’, but it is incorrect. The ‘BIOS’ (a.k.a. ‘PC BIOS’) and the UEFI are two different designs of firmware used during the booting process. BIOS firmware and MBR partitioning are older (‘legacy’) designs; UEFI firmware and GPT partitioning are the latest designs, intended to replace BIOS and MBR. See the end of this post for links to articles regarding BIOS, MBR, UEFI and GPT that I recommend you also read.

I personally have not come across computers that support solely UEFI; all the computers I have used allow the user to configure the firmware at boot via the Setup menu to use either UEFI or BIOS. Some UEFI firmware manufacturers show the BIOS support option in the Setup menu as ‘Compatibility Support Module’ (CSM) or ‘Legacy Mode’.

‘Secure Boot’ is one of the touted UEFI features not present in BIOS. Linux expert Roderick W. Smith explains Secure Boot in his article ‘Linux on UEFI: A Quick Installation Guide‘:

One optional feature of UEFI deserves mention: Secure Boot. This feature is designed to minimize the risk of a computer becoming infected with a boot kit, which is a type of malware that infects the computer’s boot loader. Boot kits can be particularly difficult to detect and remove, which makes blocking them a priority. Microsoft requires that all desktop and laptop computers that bear a Windows 8 logo ship with Secure Boot enabled. This type of configuration complicates Linux installation, although some distributions handle this problem better than do others. Do not confuse Secure Boot with EFI or UEFI, though; it’s possible for an EFI computer to not support Secure Boot, and it’s possible to disable Secure Boot even on x86-64 EFI computers that support it. Microsoft requires that users can disable Secure Boot for Windows 8 certification on x86 and x86-64 computers; however, this requirement is reversed for ARM computers—such computers that ship with Windows 8 must not permit the user to disable Secure Boot. Fortunately, ARM-based Windows 8 computers are currently rare. I recommend avoiding them.

GPT-partitioned HDDs have become the norm these days for two principal reasons:

the MBR design limits the amount of disk space accessible to a maximum of 2TiB but HDDs larger than 2TiB are now common;
Microsoft has standardised on UEFI, and UEFI will not boot an MBR-partitioned HDD (Section 5.2.1 of Version 2.6 of the UEFI Specification specifies that UEFI firmware shall not execute the boot code in an MBR located at the first logical block of a disk with the MBR disk layout).

The ‘Protective MBR’ at the beginning of every GPT-partitioned disk (in the same location on the disk as a legacy MBR would be) is designed to prevent MBR-based disk utilities misrecognising and possibly overwriting GPT-partitioned disks. A fake (i.e. it does not really exist) single partition called the ‘GPT Protective Partition’ (Code EE00) is specified in the Protective MBR to occupy as much of the drive as can be represented in an MBR, namely a maximum of 2TiB in the case of a disk with 512B sectors. Operating systems and tools not designed for GPT disks will read the Protective MBR and detect that the disk contains a single partition of unknown type and with no empty space, and will refuse to modify the disk unless the user deletes this partition. This design (i.e. the Protective MBR and GPT Protective Partition) was devised in order to minimise the possibility of a) legacy software accidentally overwriting a GPT-partitioned HDD; b) GPT-aware software accidentally overwriting an MBR-partitioned HDD (the absence of a partition of type EEh defined in the Protective MBR would indicate to GPT-aware operating systems and tools that the HDD is not GPT-partitioned).

You can use an MBR-partitioned HDD with BIOS; you can use a GPT-partitioned HDD with BIOS; you can use a GPT-partitioned HDD with UEFI; you cannot use an MBR-partitioned HDD with UEFI. If the firmware in your computer has an option to select BIOS mode (some firmware manufacturers refer to this as ‘Compatibility Support Module’ or ‘Legacy Mode’) instead of UEFI and you want to use an MBR on the HDD, you will have to use BIOS. In summary, for Linux your options are BIOS-MBR, BIOS-GPT or UEFI-GPT. I will discuss these three options and provide some possible partitioning schemes in each case.

The layout of a GPT-partitioned HDD is as follows:

The beginning of a GPT-partitioned disk
Protective MBR	512B
Primary GPT Header	512B
Primary Partition Table entries	Up to 16KiB (maximum of 128 partitions)

Therefore the unpartitioned space at the beginning of the HDD should be at least 17KiB.

Unlike in the MBR design, the end of a GPT-partitioned disk stores a backup of the partition table:

The end of a GPT-partitioned disk
Secondary Partition Table entries	Up to 16KiB (maximum of 128 partitions)
Secondary GPT Header	512B

(The Secondary GPT Header really does come after the Secondary Partition Table entries.)

Therefore the upartitioned space at end of a GPT-partitioned disk should be at least 16.5KiB.

The partitions themselves are located between the Primary GPT and the Secondary GPT, i.e. between the above two tables.

The remainder of a GPT-partitioned disk between the above two areas can contain up to 128 partitions. One partition — normally the first partition is used — must be the ‘ESP’ (EFI System Partition), which should be formatted as FAT32 and have the ‘esp’ and ‘boot’ flags set. The partition code must be EF02. The minimum possible size of a FAT32 partition is 33,549,824B (~32MiB) with 65525 clusters and 512 byte sectors, or 268,398,592B (~256MiB) with 65525 clusters and 4KiB sectors. The required size of the ESP will depend on what is stored in it (for example the now-orphaned ELILO boot loader stored the Linux kernel images in it, whereas the GRUB boot loader does not). The Ubuntu Community Help Wiki specifies a minimum of 100MiB and recommends 200MiB. The Gentoo Installation Guide recommends 128MB.

The versions of GParted and KDE Partition Manager I have used to partition HDDs seem to want to reserve at least 2048 512B sectors of empty space before the first partition (sometimes these two utilities force me to have 4096 512B sectors of empty space before the first partition), so I suggest leaving at least 1MiB of unpartitioned space at the beginning and end of the HDD if you want to partition a disk for GPT using those tools. Actually, for peace of mind you may as well leave 1MiB of empty space at the beginning and end of the disk whatever GUI tools or console commands (parted, fdisk, gdisk, etc.) you use to partition the disk.

By the way, if you wanted to use MBR instead of GPT, the MBR (512B) plus the GRUB embedding area after the MBR (~31KiB) means that 1MiB would also be more than enough for an MBR HDD (see GNU GRUB Manual – 3.4 BIOS installation).

Thus my suggestions for HDD partitioning would be as shown below. Note that the order of the partitions I have adopted below is not obligatory; you can change the order if you wish. I prefer to specify precise sizes for the swap and root partitions, and put /home on the last partition so it can occupy the remainder of the disk, whatever size that may be.

UEFI-GPT

Option 1

This is my preferred option because I can edit /etc/fstab and specify that /boot must not be mounted at boot, thus reducing the possibility of the files in /boot getting corrupted.

UEFI-GPT Option 1
1.00 MiB of empty space at the beginning of the disk.
/dev/sda1 Size: 512 MiB File system: FAT32 Flags: boot & esp Code: EF00 Label: ESP Mount point: `/boot/efi`
/dev/sda2 Size: 16 GiB for a computer with 16 GiB of RAM* File system: linux-swap Flags: None Code: 8200 Label: SWAP Mount point: None
/dev/sda3 Size: 512 MiB File system: ext2 Flags: None Code: 8300 Label: BOOT Mount point: `/boot` Therefore `/boot/grub/` will be on this partition if you use GRUB.
/dev/sda4 Size: e.g. 64 GiB (128 GiB if the drive is big) File system: ext4 Flags: None Code: 8300 Label: ROOT Mount point: `/` (root)
/dev/sda5 Size: 1.00 MiB less than the remaining disk space File system: ext4 Flags: None Code: 8300 Label: HOME Mount point: `/home`
1.00 MiB of empty space at the end of the disk.

* You will often see recommendations to make the size of the swap partition the same as the size of the RAM if you want to be able to put the computer into hibernation. In fact, the Linux kernel is normally configured to compress the contents of the RAM image for hibernation, and I personally have seen the disk image of 4GB of RAM compressed to 23% of that size. Nevertheless, if you have a large HDD you may as well just take the easy route and allocate the size of the swap partition to be the same as the RAM size, even if all of the swap partition will never be used in practice. That way you are guaranteed to be able to put the computer into hibernation.

Below is an example of the above partitioning scheme on a virtual UEFI machine with a 64GiB virtual GPT-partitioned HDD:

root # gdisk -l /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.1

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sda: 134217728 sectors, 64.0 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 54B3C38F-1C55-4A19-9BAA-499C4D0D8DD0
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 134217694
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 4029 sectors (2.0 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048         1050623   512.0 MiB   EF00
   2         1050624         5244927   2.0 GiB     8200
   3         5244928         6293503   512.0 MiB   8300
   4         6293504        72353791   31.5 GiB    8300
   5        72353792       134215679   29.5 GiB    8300

root # fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 64 GiB, 68719476736 bytes, 134217728 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 54B3C38F-1C55-4A19-9BAA-499C4D0D8DD0

Device        Start       End  Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1      2048   1050623  1048576  512M EFI System
/dev/sda2   1050624   5244927  4194304    2G Linux swap
/dev/sda3   5244928   6293503  1048576  512M Linux filesystem
/dev/sda4   6293504  72353791 66060288 31.5G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda5  72353792 134215679 61861888 29.5G Linux filesystem

root # parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA VBOX HARDDISK (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 68.7GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  538MB   537MB   fat32                 boot, esp
 2      538MB   2685MB  2147MB  linux-swap(v1)
 3      2685MB  3222MB  537MB   ext2
 4      3222MB  37.0GB  33.8GB  ext4
 5      37.0GB  68.7GB  31.7GB  ext4

root # blkid
/dev/sda4: LABEL="ROOT" UUID="174ac3e8-f105-4606-bed1-7a1aa22c3631" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="01d9c139-fe70-415a-abc6-2351fad33384"
/dev/sda1: UUID="B4C1-7EA5" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="d941f728-c386-4f4c-b0c3-aa76f4290774"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="SWAP" UUID="e3ddf9b5-2ae3-4469-a121-0a1a78aa6702" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="a4daec88-da44-4ae3-8119-01cc81325f03"
/dev/sda3: LABEL="BOOT" UUID="1e24ea9d-5358-4e9b-8667-d7a42e7b6ad7" TYPE="ext2" PARTUUID="b5369ce3-4b44-4d19-be6f-1d226dc71cb3"
/dev/sda5: LABEL="HOME" UUID="87f6a0af-dbed-4587-b810-efca8f269618" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="19fd7d00-2d89-4653-af03-e81618a3b70d"

Option 2

You could use this scheme if you are not interested in having /boot on its own partition.

UEFI-GPT Option 2
1.00 MiB of empty space at the beginning of the disk.
/dev/sda1 Size: 512 MiB File system: FAT32 Flags: boot & esp Code: EF00 Label: ESP Mount point: `/boot/efi`
/dev/sda2 Size: 16 GiB for a computer with 16 GiB of RAM* File system: linux-swap Flags: None Code: 8200 Label: SWAP Mount point: None
/dev/sda3 Size: e.g. 64 GiB (128 GiB if the drive is big) File system: ext4 Flags: None Code: 8300 Label: ROOT Mount point: `/` (root) Therefore `/boot` (and `/boot/grub/`) will on this partition too.
/dev/sda4 Size: 1.00 MiB less than the remaining space on the disk File system: ext4 Flags: None Code: 8300 Label: HOME Mount point: `/home`
1.00 MiB of empty space at the end of the disk.