Need help installing on UEFI system

[bjrosen]

I'm trying to install F17 on a new HP box with UEFI. My disk layout is
/boot/efi 256M EFI System Partition
2M BIOS Boot
/ 32G EXT4
/sl6 32G EXT4
/home 183G EXT4

On my first install the installer didn't demand a BIOS boot partition, after install it booted to a blank GRUB command line. On the next install it demanded a BIOS Boot partition. After that install the system sees no boot devices at all. I've tried putting the boot loader into both the MBR and into the root partition (the only two options offered by the installer), it makes no difference.

I've tried SL6.2, Fedora 16 and Fedora 17 Beta. Is there any way to get Linux to boot on a system with UEFI?

[GoinEasy9]

I got the lastest Kubuntu to install on an ASUS Sabertooth motherboard. Kubuntu created the FAT32 partition and is using Grub2. I've read that Fedora 16 & 17 can create the UEFI partition, but still uses a hacked legacy Grub. I've just downloaded the TC5 DVD and Live KDE CD to test, but still haven't got a chance.

You might want to look through the thread I started on April 25th. The links from srs5694, along with some I posted were helpful learning about what UEFI is and what's needed to get Linux to boot when using it.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=279144

[bjrosen]

Ubuntu 12.4 worked for me. After I installed Ubuntu I installed Scientific Linux 6.2 on another partition with grub on the root partition. I then booted into Ubuntu and ran the grub update which found SL6.2. I can now boot into SL6.2.

Does anyone know how to change the boot list in Grub2? In the old Grub it was in the grub.conf file but that file is gone in Grub2. There is a /etc/default/grub file which has a little of the functionality of the old grub.conf file but it doesn't have the boot menu in it.

[fpmurphy]

Originally Posted by bjrosen

Does anyone know how to change the boot list in Grub2? In the old Grub it was in the grub.conf file but that file is gone in Grub2. There is a /etc/default/grub file which has a little of the functionality of the old grub.conf file but it doesn't have the boot menu in it.

On Fedora 17, it is /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

[bjrosen]

Is there a way to add a chainload entry to the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file that will point to Scientific Linux's grub file? A chainload will eliminate to the need to boot into Ubuntu to run update-grub whenever I update the kernel in SL6.

[stevea]

The grub2 command you want is "configfile" not "chainload" Two very different things.
configfile (hd0,gpt2)/boot/grub/grub.cfg
for example.

[bjrosen]

I have the real solution now, use gparted to change the partition table to a DOS partition table. After the new partition table was installed I was able to install SL6.2 without any trouble and without having to waste a partition on Ubuntu.

[srs5694]

bjrosen, my suspicion is that by changing to a Master Boot Record (MBR; what GParted calls "msdos") partition table, you've effectively told the firmware to boot in BIOS mode rather than EFI mode. This makes the system work in the way you're probably more familiar with, but it also has certain limits. For instance, to take advantage of an over-2TiB disk, you pretty much must use the GUID Partition Table (GPT), rather than MBR. Thus, your solution might not work for everybody, and you might find it will fail in the future, should you upgrade your hard disk. Also, different EFI implementations use different trigger mechanisms to determine when to use an EFI-mode boot vs. a BIOS-mode boot, so what works on one computer won't work on another.

IMHO, the best way to boot Linux in EFI mode is to use a combination of the kernel's EFI stub loader and either a good EFI implementation's boot manager or rEFInd, which is a separate EFI boot manager that I forked from the earlier rEFIt. Add an EFI driver for the filesystem you use on /boot, and with the right configuration rEFInd will auto-detect your kernels when you add them. This eliminates the need to use GRUB or to modify your boot loader configuration files when you add a kernel. Currently, the biggest problem with this is that the EFI stub loader was added with the 3.3.0 kernel, so most distributions don't yet provide it. Fedora 16 does (as a package upgrade), and it'll eventually work its way into other distributions, too.