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#1 2013-12-16 23:56:00

jmayniac
Member
Registered: 2009-08-12
Posts: 17

Confused about UEFI, Windows 8 and booting Arch

I have a Lenovo Y480P laptop. It came with Windows 8 pre-installed. I've decided to give Arch a shot and I shrank my Windows 8 partition and created space for Arch. I created two partitions, an 80GB for root and a 196GB for home. I have successfully booted a USB stick that is partitioned via GPT and I installed fine, but I cannot boot the new install, the problem is UEFI.

My parition scheme is as follows:
1GB - Lenovo Recovery
260MB - ESP
1GB - Microsoft Reserved
340GB - Windows 8
80GB - Ext4 Root
196GB - Ext4 Home

I mounted /boot to the ESP that Windows 8 created, so /boot was mounted to /dev/sda2. I then mounted / to /dev/sda5 and /home to /dev/sda6. I installed the base system and then gummiboot. I ran the gummiboot install, exited and created the necessary .conf entry according to the Arch Wiki. I rebooted and was presented with the gummiboot menu, I chose "Arch Linux" and it just hangs, I get a black screen.  I looked up this in the forums and noticed there was some kind of bug with Lenovo laptops and EFISTUB loaders.  I saw that sometimes rEFInd works, so I installed that and gave it a shot and I got a hung black screen also.  I though I would try to boot directly from the EFI shell with:

fs0:\>vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/sda5 rw rootfstype=ext4 initrd add_efi_memmap initrd=\initramfs-linux.img

I tried it and I don't get an error or anything, just a hung black screen.  I've tried various modeset options and nothing matters.

efibootmgr output:

BootCurrent: 0001
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0003,0006,2001,0000,0000
Boot0000* Lenovo Recovery System
Boot0001* EFI USB Device
Boot0003* Linux Boot Manager
Boot0006* Windows Boot Manager
Boot2001* EFI USB Device

Also, secure boot is off.

Last edited by jmayniac (2013-12-16 23:59:04)

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#2 2013-12-17 03:35:26

srs5694
Member
From: Woonsocket, RI
Registered: 2012-11-06
Posts: 719
Website

Re: Confused about UEFI, Windows 8 and booting Arch

This thread covers this issue. Your best bet may be to switch to a boot loader that does not rely on the EFI stub loader, such as GRUB 2, Fedora's patched GRUB Legacy, ELILO, or SYSLINUX. Of these, GRUB 2 is the best supported by Arch, but each of the others has its merits, too.

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#3 2013-12-17 15:57:12

jmayniac
Member
Registered: 2009-08-12
Posts: 17

Re: Confused about UEFI, Windows 8 and booting Arch

Yes, installing GRUB 2 fixed the issue.

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