First a bit of context:

I have a 2008 macbook that has been running slackware for a couple of months now. I'm very happy with it but when I did the initial installation I was just testing the distro to find out if I like it. I do (so much so that I now have it on another machine as well :-) so I wanted to enable encryption on my macbook.

My idea was to re-install slackware and follow the instructions from alienbob here.

However my macbook has 2 drives that were installed when I bought it from the previous owner. An SSD for the system and the previous HDD as a storage instead of the CD-ROM.

I'm currently using refind (installed from mac os x) to manage the booting as I started dual booting into linux and mac os x, however there's only linux on the machine now.

Whilst installing slackware I noticed that the ESP is on the HDD (storage) and I'm wondering if I could move it to the SSD (system drive). This is not *really* necessary, but I imagine the SSD will be less likely to fail and I am also curious to find out if this is possible.

This is what I think my options are:

1. Leave everything as is and just use the current configuration. If it ain't broke don't fix it, etc.

2. Try and move the partition. I thought it might be enough creating a partition of the same size on the SSD and then using dd to copy the ESP across and then wipe the HDD completely. I've been having a look on the web and I've found conflicting information: some say there won't be a problem (albeit they're not usually talking about macs) and others that I would need to modify the efivars and the nvram to do this using efibootmgr.

3. Just go all the way default by wiping everything and then installing elilo when prompted by the installer. Not necesarilly against this, but not sure if it will work either as if I wipe everything I'm assuming elilo won't find an ESP to be installed to and will fail. However I've never installed it before so not sure what to expect.

Has anyone here moved the ESP between drives? On macs specifically? Am I very wrong?

Thanks in advance!

ESP=EFI system partition I assume ?
It's formatted using FAT or some such. It does not support discard/trim, which probably isn't important
since it's so small. I have no experience installing on macbooks, but if it works as normal pc's you
should be able to change your boot drive to be the ssd instead. Then it's just a question of doing a
normal efi install (read up on that regarding macbooks).

Caveat - the last Apple object I purchased was a Newton.

EFI was designed to be agnostic - UEFI was unified; then the manufacturers got to decide how they would implement it. Fiasco ensued - I imagine Apple would be amongst the worst.
In a normal world that means the firmware goes looking for a partition of the appropriate type and proceeds to load your system. Copying it is fine - I would never use dd - but I make sure the old partition is always deleted to ensure there are no issues with the enumeration of the drives by the firmware.

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Thanks for the replies!

I'm still dealing with this, in the middle of setup at the moment. But just in case anyone interested in installing on an older MacBook (2008, black plastic) finds this, here's what I've done:

I tried option 2 above by wiping the SSD, creating a new EFI System Partition with cgdisk and copying the files from the old partition onto the new one. I then wiped the old ESP and rebooted. This does not work: I just got to a weird grub error. I suspect this has something to do with the way refind works as I've never installed grub on this machine.

I'm now not inclined to try with elilo as when I tried to boot Slackware with the usbimage (it worked flawlessly with my iMac last week) it threw an error saying "LocateHandle GopProtocol failed". I tried multiple times with different options, huge.s and kms.s kernels as well as booting in text mode but nothing worked.

I'll have to re-istall refind from slackware once I'm done installing, I'll create the USB when prompted in the setup and hopefully boot from there to then install refind and leaver everything as it was.