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I'm installing Arch Linux right now. I want to wipe the whole drive clean. However, there is a partition that is EFI. I don't know what to do with it. Can I delete it?
lolreppeatlol
Posted 2016-04-02T13:27:40.563
Reputation: 103
Installing Arch Linux- Do I need EFI?
Answers
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You can wipe the whole drive if there is no OS / data you want to keep. You'll need to recreate another FAT32-formatted EFI System Partition anyway though, if you want UEFI boot instead of CSM/legacy boot.
Tom Yan
Posted 2016-04-02T13:27:40.563
Reputation: 4 744
Strictly speaking, there’s no need to create a new ESP if the existing partition isn’t in a strange location. – Daniel B – 2016-04-02T13:58:53.833
1Personally I would prefer to start from scratch anyway. No reason to keep the old boot files and EFI binaries in the ESP. And I can re-partition the drive in whatever way I want. – Tom Yan – 2016-04-02T14:01:05.240
1Another reason to start from scratch is that a lot of ESPs on delivered systems are on the small side -- ~100MB was once common, although I believe Microsoft has bumped up to ~240MB recently. Arch users often mount their ESPs at
/bootand put their kernels there, so bigger is better. There are also rare EFIs that have buggy FAT drivers that react badly to FAT32 filesystems smaller than 512MiB (note: precisely 512MiB, not 512MB). Other EFIs react badly to FAT16 ESPs. That dictates a larger-than-512MiB FAT32 ESP for greatest compatibility. – Rod Smith – 2016-04-02T19:49:44.567