@rkelsen
Thank you for sharing that info on rEFInd. I find it to be very useful in many ways. I've been contemplating which route to take in order to get Linux running on my new laptop and this looks pretty doable in my opinion. Not sure if I will use this method but it's definitely on my radar.

If I was going to run Linux only and wipe Windows [and I have to say that there's no technical reason this can't be done - it's just that my wife and kids prefer Windows] then I would just use ELILO. It is simple, but it works.

The requirement for dual booting means that something like 'refind' is perfect.

The installation could even be automated if used in conjunction with 'efibootmgr'.

Ha! I would love to wipe out windows altogether but I didn't spend all that $$ just to remove the preloaded software & put my own. Not yet at least, it's too new to me and I still need to use it on occasion, plus my woman would have a hard time with the change ( even though she's going through the same frustration anyway trying to use winblows 8).

Dual booting is definitely the route for me.

The 64-bit Slackware DVD requires BIOS boot support because there is no UEFI boot-loader on the DVD. You boot the DVD using BIOS mode and install Slackware. Once you have all the files in place and the required UEFI boot loader (available separately) then you can boot the hard disk using a UEFI boot-loader.

I hope that some day the 64-bit Slackware DVD will have a boot loader in the file "\EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI" that can boot the kernel from the DVD in UEFI mode. At the moment that directory and file are missing from the DVD. It is not a big issue, since most UEFI systems have a BIOS boot mode. If computers stop supporting El-Torito BIOS booting from DVDs then it will be more important to have the UEFI boot-loader on the setup CD. My guess is that the UEFI boot-loader won't appear on the DVD until after it starts being included as a 64-bit Slackware package.

If only it were that easy... unfortunately UEFI doesn't support the ISO9960 filesystem, so it wouldn't be able to see it.

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Then why not use USB sticks?

Just sayin'... but it'd be really cool to have a slackware branded USB stick that can boot & install slackware.

Another vote for rEFInd. I have tried elilo, grub and rEFInd and found rEFInd to be the most reliable and straightforward for dual booting.

Not sure if this fits the bill on DVD + UEFI boot or not, But it's worth a look
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:...ForBIOSAndUEFI
Too complex for my brain
always trying to help
john

I appreciate every single comment on this topic, learned alot with them.

Now I understood that the most difficult way is to try and keep my win8 with the slack on uefi, but since what I really want is to wipe win8 e run solely slackware then Im thinking on turning off secure boot and putting on legacy mode. I understand that isn't supposed to be troublesome.

Im having trouble trying to find docs about the GPT hd tho, Im pretty sure my win8 is on gpt partitions but am I going to find problems trying to just wipe everything out, creating a normal partition like I always do on the 20gb ssd with / and for the 500gb on the normal drive maybe a separated /usr and /home ?

Where can I find more about this ?

You'll have to use a GPT aware partitioning tool to remove GPT (something like gdisk). It's not enough to wipe the protective MBR with a regular tool like fdisk and create partitions, since the main GPT table will remain at the end of the drive and will possibly cause confusion about which table should be used. So you'd use gdisk to remove GPT, and then cfdisk or another fdisk tool to create regular partitions.

As far as partitioning, I'd have to say I'm not too big on making /usr separate these days just because splitting things up makes it easier to run out of space on one partition or another. It might make sense on a multiuser machine though.

I've been searching for information using Google. Sounds like you have most of the information you need already if your plan is to wipe the disk and convert to an MBR partition table. One thing you might consider if you have a large enough external drive is saving an image of the whole internal drive so that you keep the option to go back. If it's a mostly unused system it should be able to compress down to a small size, too.

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Jesus you're fast, thank you very much Pat !

knowing that the table will stay there even after the traditional wipe makes this a case closed !

BTW: I wanted to separate /usr /home and maybe even more because with the / on the 20gb SSD I'm afraid of flooding it really fast, again thank you.

Thanks for the interesting information.

That is a "hybrid" boot disk that works like this.

It has two boot entries in El-Torito boot format.

1. Platform ID 80x86 - BIOS compatible ISOLINUX
2. Platform ID EFI - UEFI compatible boot-loader image

The platform ID for each boot entry is the important thing to understand. A "platform" is basically a particular class of hardware. In this case, 80x86 for an Intel BIOS based computer, and EFI for a UEFI based computer.

A computer using a BIOS boots the default entry (or the one with platform ID 80x86). A computer using UEFI boots the entry with platform ID EFI. A computer with UEFI may show two boot choices for that disk (EFI and BIOS mode). I don't know about the rest of the details. It raises a few questions in my mind.

• Will it boot on a UEFI machine with no BIOS boot support?
• How does one create the UEFI boot-loader image?
• What other files have to be on the disk for UEFI booting?

I'm still searching for a good reference that covers CD and DVD booting with UEFI. I haven't found that mentioned in the UEFI specification so far. I haven't read through the entire UEFI spec. so it might be in there.

Yes. That's the entire reason to have the EFI compatible additions.

It needs to be a GPT disk image with a FAT partition containing the \EFI\BOOT\ directory with an EFI loader such as elilo that will load the kernel and initrd.

The booting will be handled entirely by the files in the EFI boot image, so that will contain an EFI loader such as elilo, the kernel(s), and the initrd. Nothing anywhere else on the disk will be used to boot the system. In the case of the Slackware installer, the big addition needed for the initrd is all of the stuff related to kernel modesetting for the video (arrrrgh), since many UEFI implementations won't produce any text until that kicks in.

Once the installer is going, it'll just mount the DVD as iso9660 or udf, and everything will proceed as usual. The EFI boot partition will be hidden at that point.

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Do you actually mean that the VGA text console won't be usable/enough any more to display the output of rc.S, 'setup' & friends? I really hope I misunderstood...

PS Now that you make me think about that I don't even know if 'dialog' needs framebuffer console support. I should really begin to RTFM

According to the UEFI specification version 2.3.1, UEFI does support ISO9660 and El-Torito images. However, UEFI does not "run" the El-Torito boot image in the normal way. Instead the boot image is interpreted as an EFI system partition (binary image of a FAT32 file-system). UEFI will look for the file " /efi/boot/bootx64.efi" (or other boot-loaders) in the binary image.

Here is an excerpt from the specification.

This is a rather bizarre use of the El-Torito "no emulation" mode, to make it emulate a hard disk partition when seen by UEFI. There is a hard disk emulation mode in El-Torito. I wonder why UEFI doesn't use that.

You make a UEFI boot image using the loop-back file-system to create a binary file formatted internally as FAT32. In that file-system you put a bootloader in "/efi/boot". You copy the other required files, such as a kernel and initramfs. Then you use "mkisofs" to include that binary image in the boot catalog.

The implications of this regarding secure boot are that the boot-loader must be signed with the proper key, or the disk won't boot in secure boot mode.

Putting the boot-loader directly on the DVD in "/efi/boot" does not make the DVD boot-able. However, you can run the boot-loader manually from a UEFI command shell if that is supported on your computer. This also works if the boot-loader is on the disk in some other place besides "/efi/boot".