Intel EFI Disk Utilities

Intel has a set of disk utilities, for creating/checking GPT partitions and FAT file systems. They aren’t included in TianoCore’s EDK2 with the other BSD-licensed UEFI Shell commands. These tools ship separately, with a separate license, presumably due to the tool’s knowledge of FAT file system format. Here’s a brief description of the tools, as excerpted from the download license:

Microsoft EFI Utilities: The term “Microsoft EFI Utilities” shall mean the Guided Partition Table utilities Diskpart (Disk partitioning utility), Efifmt (EFI Format utility) and Efichk (EFI Check Disk utility) stored in a file named GPT_UTIL.zip.

To get the tools, you have to agree to the license on this page, if so you get to download a zip. Then you have to read the readme in that zip, to get the password for the other included zip, which contain the actual tools. Lawyer-designed.

http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/agree_diskutil.htm

The tools come with source, not just binary. They didn’t compile for me, this morning: I think they require a much older EDK2 environment to build. But at least they ship with source, though it is not BSD-licensed Open Source. The tools are old enough that they still use “EFI”, not the newer “UEFI” term.

I wish Intel could donate these tools to the UEFI Forum, so that Intel- *AND* ARM-based users could benefit. TianoCore already has a FAT license, for it’s file system driver. Adding these tools to that package would eliminate one FAT-centric license, and bundle FAT-centric tools along with the FAT-centric file system driver. It would be nice for TianoCore to be able to fix/create ESPs, not just run from ESPs created elsewhere. Perhaps use the Disk Util common code for some other UEFI-based file system diagnostic tools for file systems that UEFI ships, eg UFS, maybe UDF.

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