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EFI UEFI GUID GPT and large TB partitions

Acronyms

First, there is a soup of acronyms and needless jargon piled up to confuse people moving to a GPT.

EFI(Extensible Firmware Interface)
UEFI(Unified Extensible Firmware Interface)
GUID(Globally Unique Identifier)
GPT(GUID Partition Table)

Basics

EFI / UFI systems are basically evil yet we have to live with them.

In EFI or UEFI systems, the bootstrap code area in MBR is usually empty as UEFI don't use MBR for partitioning, instead GPT uses a special partition type called EFI system partition. Instead, all bootloaders are stored as ordinary example.efi programs in an "EFI system partition", which is a regular FAT32 partition with a special "partition type" in the partition table. If you have multiple operating systems, they share the same EFI system partition.

On Debian Linux this partition is mounted under

/boot as /boot/efi

While I've read that the size of the partition should be 200M I only see the one file and it is 512 bytes????

Use only grub2 for efi booting.

/boot/efi
├── EFI
│ ├─── arch
│ │ ├─── initramfs-linux.img
│ │ └─── vmlinuz-linux.efi
│ └─── gummiboot
│ └─── gummiboot.efi
├─── loader
│ ├─── entries
│ │ └─── arch.conf
│ └─── loader.conf
└─── SHELLX64.EFI

How to make a large TB partition

First, we need to make a drive that instead of having the old MBR style partition table to the newer GPT table.

Install parted ( this is a good time to learn parted and forget fdisk - this is the new tool ).

Important: You will need a motherboard that supports Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and the Unified EFI (UEFI) if you want to boot off of it. Most people put their system on a smaller drive (try a SSD!).

$ parted -a optimal /dev/new
(parted) mklabel gpt ; We need this for big partitions - label in this case means a new partition table of the gpt type
(parted) mkpart primary 8192S -1 ; use the whole drive for the partition
(parted) q

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