- It is not necessary to start booting with EFI if you have GPT partitions (you could choose to have legacy boot with GPT partitions).
- It is not necessary that EFI partition be at the start of a disk: it could be in every place, provided that it has a) boot (esp) flags, and b) at least 110mb of space.
a non-destructive way to modify a multi-boot
You can try gdisk: a very simple, easy, fast and safe, command-line tool.
With gdisk you can make several actions, such as:
- convert a MBR disk to a GPT one (with the command gdsk and then the disk you want modify , i.g. /dev/sda, and the doing the command “w”, that is “write”)
- re-order your partition table (with the command “s”, that is “sort”), if in your disk there is some “desorder”, i.g. if /dev/sdb8 is before /dev/sdb6.
Be careful, if you get a warning message that partitions will be deleted: it can really happen.
But mainly be careful that if you change the order of SO partitions you could not be more able to boot.