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An example directory structure for an EFI System Partition present on a hard disk
with SuSE and Windows Server 2003 installed is as follows:
\EFI
\Microsoft
\WINNT50
\EFIDrivers
\SuSE
\MSUtils
There can be only one ESP on a single disk. The size of the ESP is determined
using the following algorithm:
ESP = max(100 MB, min(1% of physical disk, 1GB))
In other words, the size of the ESP must be the larger of these two numbers, 100
MB or 1% of the physical disk size (up to 1 GB). For example, for an 18 GB disk,
the size of the ESP is 184 MB. The value 1% of the physical disk is calculated at
the time that the ESP is created and does not change if the disk is extended later
(for example, via RAID).
Note: Each bootable GPT disk must contain an EFI System Partition.
The ESP should be the first partition on the disk, right after protective MBR as
shown in Figure 1-5.
EFI
System
Protective
Partition
MBR
(ESP)
Figure 1-5 Boot GPT disk structure
The EFI specification supports only FAT or FAT32 on the ESP partition.
Note: The ESP is not visible to the operating systems users by default but can
be accessed for read/write operations from within the operating system by
special commands. For Windows-specific information, see "Accessing EFI
System Partition from Windows" on page 96. For SuSE information, see
"Partitions on IA-64 Linux" on page 111.
Data partition(s)
Chapter 1. Technical description
9
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