UEFI:NTFS - Boot NTFS partitions from UEFI

This generic bootloader (which is primarily intended for use with Rufus but can also be used independently), is meant to allow seamless boot from an EFI bootloader, that resides on an NTFS partition. In other words, UEFI:NTFS is designed to remove the UEFI restriction of being able to natively boot from FAT32 only, and allow NTFS boot without the need for any user intervention.

This can be used, for instance, for booting a Windows NTFS installation media, in UEFI mode, thus allowing support for files that are larger than 4GB (something a native UEFI FAT32 partition cannot support), or allow indiscriminate BIOS+UEFI boot of Windows To Go drives.

The way this works, in conjunction with Rufus, is as follows:

• Rufus creates 2 partitions on the target USB disk (these can be MBR or GPT partitions). The first one is an NTFS partition occupying almost all the drive, that contains the Windows files (for Windows To Go, or for regular installation), and the second is a very small FAT partition, located at the very end, that contains an NTFS UEFI driver (see http://efi.akeo.ie) as well as the UEFI:NTFS bootloader.
• When the USB drive boots in UEFI mode, the first NTFS partition gets ignored by the UEFI firmware (unless that firmware already includes an NTFS driver, in which case 2 boot options will be available, that perform the same thing) and the UEFI:NTFS bootloader from the bootable FAT partition is executed.
• UEFI:NTFS then loads the relevant NTFS UEFI driver, locates the existing NTFS partition on the same media, and executes the /efi/boot/bootia32.efi, /efi/boot/bootx64.efi or /efi/boot/bootarm.efi that resides there. This achieves the exact same outcome as if the UEFI firmware had native support for NTFS and could boot straight from it.

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2015 or MinGW/MinGW64 (preferably installed using msys2) or gcc
• QEMU
• git
• wget, unzip, if not using Visual Studio

Sub-Module initialization

For convenience, the project relies on the gnu-efi library (but not on the gnu-efi compiler itself), so you need to initialize the git submodules:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Compilation and testing

If using Visual Studio, just press F5 to have the application compiled and launched in the QEMU emulator.

If using gcc, you should be able to simply issue make. If needed you can also issue something like make ARCH=<arch> CROSS_COMPILE=<tuple> where <arch> is one of ia32, x64 or arm and tuple is the one for your cross-compiler (e.g. arm-linux-gnueabihf-).

You can also debug through QEMU by specifying qemu to your make invocation. Be mindful however that this turns the special _DEBUG mode on, and you should run make without invoking qemu to produce proper release binaries.

Download and installation

You can find a ready-to-use FAT partition image, containing the x86 (both 32 and 64 bit) and ARM (32 bit) versions of the UEFI:NTFS loader and driver in the Rufus project, under /res/uefi.

If you create a partition of the same size at the end of your drive and copy uefi-ntfs.img there (in DD mode of course), then you should have everything you need to make the first NTFS partition on that drive UEFI bootable.

Visual Studio and ARM support

To enable ARM compilation in Visual Studio 2015, you must perform the following:

• Make sure Visual Studio is fully closed.
• Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V140\Platforms\ARM and remove the read-only attribute on Platform.Common.props.
• With a text editor running with Administrative privileges open:
  C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V140\Platforms\ARM\Platform.Common.props.
• Under the <PropertyGroup> section add the following:
  <WindowsSDKDesktopARMSupport>true</WindowsSDKDesktopARMSupport>