[Novalug] Failed attempt to do a uEFI install

James Ewing Cottrell III jecottrell3@comcast.net
Mon Jun 20 14:56:26 EDT 2016


Comments Inline.

On 6/20/2016 12:42 PM, Stuart Gathman via Novalug wrote:
> On 06/16/2016 09:41 PM, James Ewing Cottrell III via Novalug wrote:
>> Perhaps your FAT-16 should be a FAT-32 instead.
>>
>> Some {soft,firm}ware is picky.
>>
>> But perhaps the worst thing is the EF02, the BIOS Boot partition.
>>
>> Remember, BIOS and EFI tend to be Mutually Exclusive. Make sure that
>> your Firmware is set to uEFI only. Try wiping the disk label and
>> manually partitioning by hand in the CTRL-ALT-F2 Shell Window of the
>> Installer.
>>
>> I dunno about F24. It may be Too New. I had Bad Luck with CentOS 7.2,
>> but 7.1 worked.
> The Fedora 24 installer insisted creating the EFI partition as FAT-16
> (there was no option for FAT-32 - just vfat, which autosizes).  It also
> insisted that I create the BIOS Boot partition.
I installed F23 yesterday and it didn't do anything surprising. In fact, 
it looked almost exactly like the CentOS 7 distros I installed. I'll try 
F24, but I chose "I'll do partitioning manually" and then chose 
"Standard Partitions" rather than "LVM" or "btrfs" on the next page.

BTW, FAT-32 *is* VFAT.
>
> However, I did finally get it to work.   Many thanks to Greg (I think)
> who brought the boxes of spare parts.  The old Nvidia PCI Express card
> was compatible with h8 BIOS, making it a working system again!  (The h8
> has a secure boot catch 22 where you must boot win8+ in secure boot mode
> to update the BIOS - and newer video cards won't work with the old h8
> BIOS.)
>
> The secret to getting uEFI to work with the Fedora installer was ....
> .
> .
> .
> You have to boot the Live USB in uEFI mode.
Of Course! Bryan was Very Clear on this, as were the Docs I read.

BTW, I discovered that CentOS 7.2 works Just Fine. I figured that Fixing 
the Bootstrap after installing might have something to do with 
grub2-install or grub2-mkconfig, but it really doesn't. What you have to 
do is boot the Install Medium in Rescue Mode, and then use efimanager to 
reset the boot order.

Over the weekend I have been installing various Linuxi, each to a GPT 
Partition, so far I have

1: ESP, 1G; 2: Win 10, 100G; 3: VFAT, 80G; 4: SWAP, 20G
5: CentOS 7.2; 6: Fedora 23; 7: Debian testing; 8: Ubuntu Xenial; <--- 
all 50G
9: Linux Mint; 10: free; 11: free; 12: Suse Leap; <--- all 50G
13: /home, 97G

All the Installs go well, and seem to include previous installs. At the 
end, I'll probably need
to go back and run grub2-mkconfig on the earlier installs.

> I tried doing that
> initially, but thought it was "hung".  I tried it again, and went to
> make to make tea.  When I came back, it had finished booting the live
> USB.  I did the install over again.  Anaconda still created EFI as
> FAT-16 and required a BIOSBoot (which is apparently used in case you
> need to boot the GPT disk on a legacy system - it also creates a
> "protective" Dos partition label).  But now the disk boots.
Protective MBRs are a Standard Feature of GPT. Yes, a  BIOSBoot flag 
might be necessary in a Legacy System Boot, but *you aren't going to DO 
that*! It's all uEFI from here on in.

In theory, you could build a device that boots in two different 
ways....a kind of Hybrid, but I'd just as soon build two devices....a 
Legacy USB and a uEFI USB.
> I think I could have manually formatted the EFI partition as FAT-32, and
> told Anaconda not to reformat - but the h8 doesn't seem to mind FAT-16.
Fair enough. Still, the rumor is that certain combos of Mobo/Windows 
might not like it. Personally, I have decided Never to create a FAT-12 
or FAT-16 filesystem; it's all going to be FAT-32.
> While the liveUSB takes a really long time to boot in uEFI mode (why?),
> the hard disk does not have that problem.  The uEFI boot proceeds at
> full speed.
WHY would you want to build a Live USB?!? USBs are essentially *Real 
Disks", so just Partition and Install to them as usual. Live CDs usually 
use some form of the "squash file system", so they have to be Uncompressed.

Live CDs were a Good Idea back when CDs and even DVDs were the biggest 
Removable Media around....but with the advent of Bootable USB, well, 
just install to them normally.

JIM




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