Arch Linux

Battus

Member

Registered: 2011-09-24

Posts: 37

First boot of PC with UEFI

I have just completed my first homebuilt PC.

One thing I didn't realize is that the Asrock motherboard used, has UEFI
instead of regular BIOS.

The Arch live CD, from which I have installed a couple of systems on other machines
clearly does not work with UEFI.

I have searched ArchWiki and Internet and learnt more about UEFI in general but so far
I've found nothing on how to boot a new/empty machine from live CD when only UEFI
is present...

A slight pointer in the right direction would be most welcome...

litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

Archboot supports UEFI booting: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Archboot

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ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

FlyingHappy

Member

From: Cincinnati, OH

Registered: 2011-04-18

Posts: 192

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

I have an Asrock board and had no problems whatsoever with it.  The only thing I had to do is change boot priorities and make sure that the SATA 3.0 connection was set to be able to boot otherwise it wouldn't see my HDD.

cfr

Member

From: Cymru

Registered: 2011-11-27

Posts: 7,152

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

I believe that most UEFI systems are also able to boot in BIOS or "legacy" mode. For example, I can set mine to boot UEFI only, BIOS only, UEFI first with BIOS fallback or BIOS first with UEFI fallback. Have you checked whether there's a similar option?

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AaronD

Member

From: Tosev 3

Registered: 2009-01-27

Posts: 29

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

I have an Asrock board and had no problems whatsoever with it.

Does suspend/hibernate work on your board?

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--Aaron

FlyingHappy

Member

From: Cincinnati, OH

Registered: 2011-04-18

Posts: 192

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

Haven't tried it yet on Arch.  Sleep works in Windowz7 though.

Battus

Member

Registered: 2011-09-24

Posts: 37

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

Thanks for all  the answers...

litemotiv,

Thanks for that tip. I am downloading the iso at this moment (download first, ask questions later...). I must say reading the Archboot article in ArchWiki, left me a little confused but I'll come back to this later, if necessary.
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FlyingHappy,

You said:

I have an Asrock board and had no problems whatsoever with it.

Pity you don't say which board (mine is A75M-HVS) and that yours has UEFI.  (but I assume you wouldn't be answering this if has regular BIOS... ).
I have read something in the board's User Manual (which of course only deals with installing Redmond products) about the SATA3's - i.e. setting the SATA mode to "IDE" - which I have a feeling might help. I'm not sure though what you mean by:

...SATA 3.0 connection was set to be able to boot...

  and I don't think I've seen anything about this in the UEFI setup screens. Anyway my HDD is empty and not even formatted, so I need to boot from CD/DVD (or perhaps USB stick).
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cfr,

I'd heard this from another source too but I haven't found anything yet in the UEFI setup screens. The manual you get with the board doesn't mention anything of the sort either...

Da_Coynul

Member

From: United States of America

Registered: 2010-10-02

Posts: 85

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

I have an Asrock Z68 Pro3m and just changed from BIOS to UEFI boot yesterday.  I think there is a setting in the Asrock UEFI setup that lets you choose between UEFI and legacy boot, so make sure you set that correctly.  As @litemotiv said, the Archboot iso will definitely help you get GRUB2 EFI installed.  Follow the GRUB2 wiki closely and you should be OK.

Right now everything seems to be working fine on my system except I am stuck with a low resolution framebuffer console (max 1024x768).  I don't know if this is a limitation of UEFI boot and the efifb driver or if it is an issue with the nvidia 295.33 driver.

@Battus, please post with your results after you get everything set up!

Last edited by Da_Coynul (2012-04-06 18:50:03)

cfr

Member

From: Cymru

Registered: 2011-11-27

Posts: 7,152

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

Right now everything seems to be working fine on my system except I am stuck with a low resolution framebuffer console (max 1024x768).  I don't know if this is a limitation of UEFI boot and the efifb driver or if it is an issue with the nvidia 295.33 driver.

I'm not sure - I don't know much about anything and I haven't used the nvidia drivers (only nouveau) but I think it is nvidia rather than uefi. I believe nvidia doesn't use KMS or only uses some nvidia-specific version or something and that means you only get the low resolution console. (But I could be entirely wrong about every element of this claim.) I think the nouveau drivers should give you native resolution but the machine I have nouveau on has 1024x768 as native, so I can't be sure - but it definitely uses KMS, so I think it should.

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Battus

Member

Registered: 2011-09-24

Posts: 37

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

@Da_Coynul,

Thanks for your additional information. Great to hear you've got UEFI running there. No luck here yet. I had trouble burning the Archboot iso, but that's OK now. However I can't get it to boot on my new homemade, ASRock based, machine (I only put it together yesterday and it is completely empty - i.e. nothing installed on HDD which is not yet formatted).

In my innocence, I was hoping the Archboot iso CD would boot directly under UEFI but no such luck (should it? - or do I absolutely have to look for the possibility to do a legacy boot, which I don't seem to find anywhere ).

Whatever I try, I always get the same long-winded message:
"Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key".

I have been in the EFI Shell and the map statement tells me I have blk0: and blk1: devices both of which refer, I think, to the HDD. What I don't seem to see is my CD-ROM. Could this have anything to do with my problems, I wonder...

cfr

Member

From: Cymru

Registered: 2011-11-27

Posts: 7,152

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

Archboot should boot in UEFI mode. (I don't know if you can boot it in legacy mode.)

I haven't used Archboot myself but have you tried it on a USB stick instead? If it can't find your CD...

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CLI Paste | How To Ask Questions

Arch Linux | x86_64 | GPT | EFI boot | refind | stub loader | systemd | LVM2 on LUKS
Lenovo x270 | Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz | Intel Wireless 8265/8275 | US keyboard w/ Euro | 512G NVMe INTEL SSDPEKKF512G7L

Da_Coynul

Member

From: United States of America

Registered: 2010-10-02

Posts: 85

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

Whatever I try, I always get the same long-winded message:
"Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key".

I have been in the EFI Shell and the map statement tells me I have blk0: and blk1: devices both of which refer, I think, to the HDD. What I don't seem to see is my CD-ROM. Could this have anything to do with my problems, I wonder...

Here's how it worked for me:  place the Archboot CD in the drive and press F11 to get to the boot menu.  All drives should be listed.  The CD drive is actually listed twice - once with drive name by itself and again with UEFI before the drive name.  Select the UEFI drive and proceed from there.

If you are not seeing this, I would check the drive with another live CD to make sure there is not a problem with the Archboot CD or the drive itself.  Also you could try a different drive cable.  Good luck!

Last edited by Da_Coynul (2012-04-07 11:39:19)

Battus

Member

Registered: 2011-09-24

Posts: 37

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

I've been trying things and I think I'm getting somewhere!  Both the following comments were most useful!

Archboot should boot in UEFI mode. (I don't know if you can boot it in legacy mode.)
I haven't used Archboot myself but have you tried it on a USB stick instead? If it can't find your CD...

and

Here's how it worked for me:  place the Archboot CD in the drive and press F11 to get to the boot menu.  All drives should be listed.  The CD drive is actually listed twice - once with drive name by itself and again with UEFI before the drive name.  Select the UEFI drive and proceed from there.
If you are not seeing this, I would check the drive with another live CD to make sure there is not a problem with the Archboot CD or the drive itself.

The Archboot live CD works fine on my everyday PC. So I'm definitely beginning to doubt the SATA DVD burner on my new, homemade machine. from which I've been trying to boot with the Archboot live CD.(and quite a few others), without joy.

On pressing F11 during POST The drive only appears in the boot device list as SATA:  and not as UEFI:.

A USB stick, on the contrary, does appear in the list both as USB : and as UEFI:

I can switch to the stick when in the EFI Shell. Having made the USB stick current in the shell with fs0:, it is possible to use all the usual commands, ls, cd, type,
there's even a respectable full screen text editor (edit). This shell is also given in the list of boot devices, as "UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell" so maybe its also possible to boot from the shell, somehow???

I shall now find out how to boot from USB stick and hopefully sort the DVD burner out later.

Thanks once more for the help !

Da_Coynul

Member

From: United States of America

Registered: 2010-10-02

Posts: 85

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

Right now everything seems to be working fine on my system except I am stuck with a low resolution framebuffer console (max 1024x768).  I don't know if this is a limitation of UEFI boot and the efifb driver or if it is an issue with the nvidia 295.33 driver.

I'm not sure - I don't know much about anything and I haven't used the nvidia drivers (only nouveau) but I think it is nvidia rather than uefi. I believe nvidia doesn't use KMS or only uses some nvidia-specific version or something and that means you only get the low resolution console. (But I could be entirely wrong about every element of this claim.) I think the nouveau drivers should give you native resolution but the machine I have nouveau on has 1024x768 as native, so I can't be sure - but it definitely uses KMS, so I think it should.

It turns out the nvidia driver is the problem: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpos … stcount=13

So I switched to the onboard Intel GPU with the xf86-video-intel driver and now GRUB2 gives an additional video mode of 1280x1024 (still not full resolution, but better).  Also, with Intel graphics, efifb is switched out with inteldrmfb at boot which gives me native resolution TTY's.  It sounds like the nouveau driver works in a similar way, but I had random Gnome shell freezes with nouveau so I am setting my Nvidia card aside for now.

tuxqi

Member

Registered: 2012-04-14

Posts: 9

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

HI, sorry I'm gong to hijack this thread abit with my problems... I've tried for help in a couple of other forums and none of yet haev been fruitful.

This is my first time booing into a uefi pc.

I tried both archboot and ubuntu as they both have disks that can boot into uefi mode.

but my problem is I can't get past the grub menu the screen juts goes black and I can't see anything and no monitor warnings are displayed.

Now I have read the above posts about issues with nvidia cards on pure uefi systems but I'm not even able to get into a basic graphics mode with mine.  I've tried a few things in the boot options adding 'nomodeset' etc but none of them seem to work..

can anyone here help? currently my new pc is just collecting dust.

the.ridikulus.rat

Member

From: Indiana, USA

Registered: 2011-10-04

Posts: 765

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

HI, sorry I'm gong to hijack this thread abit with my problems... I've tried for help in a couple of other forums and none of yet haev been fruitful.

This is my first time booing into a uefi pc.

I tried both archboot and ubuntu as they both have disks that can boot into uefi mode.

but my problem is I can't get past the grub menu the screen juts goes black and I can't see anything and no monitor warnings are displayed.

Now I have read the above posts about issues with nvidia cards on pure uefi systems but I'm not even able to get into a basic graphics mode with mine.  I've tried a few things in the boot options adding 'nomodeset' etc but none of them seem to work..

can anyone here help? currently my new pc is just collecting dust.

I think https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manua … ml#gfxmode might help you. Can you try setting

set gfxpayload="text"

in grub.cfg , or

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX="text"

in /etc/default/grub and regenerate grub.cfg .

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Lenovo Thinkpad E430

Battus

Member

Registered: 2011-09-24

Posts: 37

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

I'm going to hijack this thread a bit

That's OK by me. Problem's very similar to mine... perhaps we'll all learn something...
I've scaled down my own problem with the UEFI boot for the moment.
Now I'm trying just simply to access the two possible internal boot drives (optical and hard disk).
They are both on a SATA 3 (6Gb) controller and although they have always been visible in the UEFI setup program I was unable to see them
In any Linux I booted. (I should explain that I came across an external USB-connected optical drive. From this I've been able to boot some (but not all)
Linux distros in "legacy" mode and so have a working system, but many of these did not "see" the SATA disks - until this afternoon -
I tried Ubuntu 10-04 LTS as live CD - and lo and behold there were my two SATA disks!!! Progress! I immediately formatted the hard disk with a GPT
as a first step towards UEFI booting...

I've discovered that the UEFI system I have, switches "automatically" to either UEFI or legacy booting according to what it finds on the boot device - a GPT or an MBR
(at least I assume that is what it bases the choice on).

There is still something not quite right with internal optical drive so I won't be able to boot from that just yet, but I'll let you know as and when there is more progress.

One of the systems which would not boot from the external optical drive was Arch   (archboot CD). It gets on it's way well enough but then the message:
"Switching to radeon kms mode" appears. The screen goes black and that's it. My current setup uses the built-in graphics on the motherboard, so perhaps the addition
of a graphics card would help Arch to boot (???).

_____
Battus

the.ridikulus.rat

Member

From: Indiana, USA

Registered: 2011-10-04

Posts: 765

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

I have an Asrock Z68 Pro3m and just changed from BIOS to UEFI boot yesterday.  I think there is a setting in the Asrock UEFI setup that lets you choose between UEFI and legacy boot, so make sure you set that correctly.  As @litemotiv said, the Archboot iso will definitely help you get GRUB2 EFI installed.  Follow the GRUB2 wiki closely and you should be OK.

Right now everything seems to be working fine on my system except I am stuck with a low resolution framebuffer console (max 1024x768).  I don't know if this is a limitation of UEFI boot and the efifb driver or if it is an issue with the nvidia 295.33 driver.

@Battus, please post with your results after you get everything set up!

From https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manua … ml#gfxmode . You can try different modes for gfxmode and/or gfxpayload in grub.cfg in a semi-colon delimited way.

set gfxmode="1920x1080x32;1366x768x32;1024x768x32;800x600x32;auto;text"
set gfxpayload="keep"

or

GRUB_GFXMODE="1920x1080x32;1366x768x32;1024x768x32;800x600x32;auto;text"
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX="keep"

in /etc/default/grub and regenerate grub.cfg .

GRUB2 will try all these modes in the listed order (listing order matters) until one of them works. However if you use only "auto", grub2 will try from the lowest possible resolution and tires next higher resolution if the lower one does not work. If might try 640x480, then 800x600, then 1024x768 ans so on. If it find that 800x600 works fine, it will not try 1024x768 and so you won't get a higher framebuffer resolution (unless KMS kicks in), even though 1024x768 or higher resolutions might work in your system.

Last edited by the.ridikulus.rat (2012-04-14 16:23:47)

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the.ridikulus.rat

Member

From: Indiana, USA

Registered: 2011-10-04

Posts: 765

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

One of the systems which would not boot from the external optical drive was Arch   (archboot CD). It gets on it's way well enough but then the message:
"Switching to radeon kms mode" appears. The screen goes black and that's it. My current setup uses the built-in graphics on the motherboard, so perhaps the addition
of a graphics card would help Arch to boot (???).

Can you try the kernel parameter

radeon.modeset=0

or try "nomodeset"?

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AUR | GitHub | Gitorious | Bitbucket

Lenovo Thinkpad E430

tuxqi

Member

Registered: 2012-04-14

Posts: 9

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

HI, sorry I'm gong to hijack this thread abit with my problems... I've tried for help in a couple of other forums and none of yet haev been fruitful.

This is my first time booing into a uefi pc.

I tried both archboot and ubuntu as they both have disks that can boot into uefi mode.

but my problem is I can't get past the grub menu the screen juts goes black and I can't see anything and no monitor warnings are displayed.

Now I have read the above posts about issues with nvidia cards on pure uefi systems but I'm not even able to get into a basic graphics mode with mine.  I've tried a few things in the boot options adding 'nomodeset' etc but none of them seem to work..

can anyone here help? currently my new pc is just collecting dust.

I think https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manua … ml#gfxmode might help you. Can you try setting

set gfxpayload="text"

in grub.cfg , or

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX="text"

in /etc/default/grub and regenerate grub.cfg .

How do I do this when I can't even install the system?  or do you mean add  GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text   in the boot params of grub?

the.ridikulus.rat

Member

From: Indiana, USA

Registered: 2011-10-04

Posts: 765

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

@tuxqi: Add "set gfxpayload=text" before "linux ..." line by editing grub menuentry while booting Archboot.

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Lenovo Thinkpad E430

tuxqi

Member

Registered: 2012-04-14

Posts: 9

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

@tuxqi: Add "set gfxpayload=text" before "linux ..." line by editing grub menuentry while booting Archboot.

ok thanks, just tried it and sadly I still just get a black screen.

I did read on a forum post from 2 years ago and someone said then cpu can sometimes be the cause... I'm using a i7 Sandy Bridge-E CPU.  If that helps..

Da_Coynul

Member

From: United States of America

Registered: 2010-10-02

Posts: 85

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

@tuxqi: Add "set gfxpayload=text" before "linux ..." line by editing grub menuentry while booting Archboot.

ok thanks, just tried it and sadly I still just get a black screen.

I did read on a forum post from 2 years ago and someone said then cpu can sometimes be the cause... I'm using a i7 Sandy Bridge-E CPU.  If that helps..

Does your motherboard give you a choice between UEFI and MBR boot?  And if so, did you make sure it is set correctly?

tuxqi

Member

Registered: 2012-04-14

Posts: 9

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

I had a look around a few hours ago and another look just now.. but appears to be UEFI Only. Unless its under some weird option/name.

I am starting even consider the unthinkable... buying windows 7 pro.. :s  I've been a Linux user for 8 years.....

but at least I can get the system running and  use it... and even install a virtual machine... and then periodically see if any updates fix the issue... but I would prefer not to do this...

the.ridikulus.rat

Member

From: Indiana, USA

Registered: 2011-10-04

Posts: 765

Re: First boot of PC with UEFI

@tuxqi: Can you try https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 9#p1083439 .

AIF profile at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 3#p1084283

ISOs at http://releng.archlinux.org/isos/ .

Last edited by the.ridikulus.rat (2012-04-15 07:27:28)

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