Right. New install, new setup with drives, great. I got some brand new velociraptor drives recently and my SSD that I have has been throwing issues. So I decided to install Netrunner Rolling to see what they’ve been up to, especially because I am sick of debian. As you can probably tell, I have boot problems, based on the title.
The system installs. No failures. And I can select the boot on a usb livedisk. But on system boot I can’t get in to the uefi boot selection. I have set the bios in all the different ways and configs possible to make this work that aren’t bios based. UEFI only, UEFI First, changed primary, automatic, and error boot order 3 or 4 times in every combination, reset the bios completely and reset everything to primary drives, selected the boot drive in the boot select menu, reinstalled 5 or 6 times with the esp partitiot in front of root, behind root, and in all sorts of other orders. Nothing.
Now, I could have bios settings and not uefi, sure, and I could never usd GPT, fine, but I might as well learn. So any help would be great.
And again, I can select “boot from first hard drive” from a usb, but will not boot on its own. Do I need a boot/bios part?
Seriously I don’t know what to do I don’t own any other UEFI machines and macs are nothing similar. Please, even a meme reply. If you have an idea for fucks sake stop lurking.
Refind works? Sorta? I think I’ll fuck with this in the morning theres something I have to have missed in the BIOS. Will post in the morning what solution I have come up with.
How are your partitions set up? Normally for a UEFI system I have them set as:
EFI (fat32) - 512MB
Boot (ext4) - 512MB
Root (ext4/xfs) - rest of disk
Home (ext4/xfs) - seperate drive
When I have had issues I’ve just grabbed the USB bootable version of refind and dd’d to the EFI partition (sda1). It removes the EFI entries but it finds the kernel in the boot partition.
Refind is definitely usable on all operating systems, I originally found it when trying to dual/triple boot on a Mac. Works with windows, Mac, Linux and any other EFI capable OSs
If all else fails, you could just switch to using plain old MBR booting in the BIOS.
Update to this. So my machine’s uefi itself is bugged. They put the normal bios options in there as a temporary patch until they could get it fixed, which they did the following year of release. My machine isn’t on the most up-to-date bios though. It is.still in uefi mode, however.
So what did I do? Booted into the usb, supposedly installed refind, and when I rebooted systemd-boot popped up like it should. Apparently theres a patch built in to many bootloadur tools, such as refind, that fixes the partitioning on the drives such that is appears as a usb or something for bugged machines like mine, or at least thats my understanding of it. So, my ESP now pops up in the uefi boot select screen as “unknown removeable device” and the machine boots just fine. No memory problems, nothing. And to get rid of the patch I just have to flash over it with a new bios (except the newer bios has one of the uefi bugs from 2014 so I’m not going to bother).
TLDR bios had a bug, refind has a patch built in for that, machine is gud.