[wolrah]

> I've seen none that even hinted at making the DVD ISO a target, leading me to believe it wasn't well supported 20 years ago.

One of the most underrated things about UEFI in my opinion is how it made booting simple. No longer did you need to use special tools (or arcane knowledge) to stick a special real-mode binary in to a normally hidden area of your intended media, now you just drop a few PE binaries in a filesystem your UEFI can read and let it figure itself out.

I just created a bootable restore image for one of my clients and it's literally a zip file that can be extracted in to the root of a FAT32 disk drive and will boot on any x86-64 UEFI PC, with Secure Boot fully operational. No special tools required, just drop files on any disk using a filesystem any computer that matters can read/write.

[hulitu]

> One of the most underrated things about UEFI in my opinion is how it made booting simple. No longer did you need to use special tools (or arcane knowledge) to stick a special real-mode binary in to a normally hidden area of your intended media, now you just drop a few PE binaries in a filesystem your UEFI can read and let it figure itself out.

In theory, yes. In practice, booting Slackware (elilo) from UEFI has been a challenge.

[lmz]

I guess for removable media that's fine, but Windows still likes to hide the ESP.

[wolrah]

> I guess for removable media that's fine, but Windows still likes to hide the ESP.

It's not hidden, it's shown in disk management, it's just not mounted by default.

IMO that is perfectly reasonable considering 99.999% of users will never want or need to do anything with it and those who do want/need to access it should have no problem finding a single well-documented command. For everyone else it's just a "delete system32" level temptation to do something stupid that'll break their system.

mountvol <letter>: /s

I honestly have no idea what it'll do if multiple EFI system partitions are present though. I presume this command will mount the one Windows has booted from.

[lmz]

Yeah, but even then to change the default loader you'll need to point it to something else using some arcane bcdedit command. Dropping some PE binaries is not good enough.

[wolrah]

Or just boot in to the EFI config interface and set a new default that way.

[lmz]

Only if it's registered! Registering a new binary isn't usually in the customer motherboard menus.