Arch Linux

toastedmilque

Member

Registered: 2014-01-04

Posts: 1

[SOLVED] Blank black invisible Gummiboot menu

I am dual booting Windows 8 and Arch Linux. I am simply booting from the hard drive, not a USB.

Since I have a UEFI motherboard, I decided to forgo GRUB and install Gummiboot instead, as recommended by the installation guide.

pacman -S gummiboot
gummiboot install

I then added the following to /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf:

title          Arch Linux
linux          /vmlinuz-linux
initrd         /initramfs-linux.img
options        root=/dev/sda2 rw

And the following to /boot/loader/loader.conf:

default  arch
timeout  5

First of all: yes, my monitor is turned on.

• I'm using an HDMI connection.

• I have Secure Boot disabled.

• I can boot just fine. After the five second time out, my system boots into Arch (the default selection), but for those five seconds, my screen is black. I don't see a menu or anything else.

• I increased the timeout to 30 seconds. My screen is completely black until my system boots into Arch (once the 30 second timeout is reached).

• Interestingly, the Gummiboot menu is functional, even though I can't see it. If I hit the down arrow, and then hit enter, my system boots into Windows 8.

• If I hold the spacebar when I boot up, my screen stays black, because holding the spacebar cancels the timeout.

• I see normal UEFI output before Gummiboot, nothing during the Gummiboot menu, and normal display after the Gummiboot menu.

• I haven't installed X yet, although I don't understand why that would help a bootloader.

Any ideas why I can't see my Gummiboot menu? Searching for answers hasn't turned up any results, so maybe I'm just missing something easy.

Thanks!

UPDATE (2014 January 03):

I figured it out. You must have Quiet Boot enabled in your BIOS.

I hope someone finds this useful!

Last edited by toastedmilque (2014-01-04 05:28:23)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] Blank black invisible Gummiboot menu

I figured it out. You must have Quiet Boot enabled in your BIOS.

Unless you give some indication of what hardware you are using here, your solution isn't really of very much use.  Every vendor provides different firmware, and they even vary from model to model.  So this 'Quiet Boot' option is not something that is standardized across all hardware.

Zeroedout

Member

Registered: 2013-07-30

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Blank black invisible Gummiboot menu

I'll be damned, thanks! I had the same issue and was dumbfounded. It's called 'Diplay Boot Logo' in my UEFI firmware / BIOS, this is on an MSI B85M-P33. I can't imagine this is intended behaviour by Gummiboot, I'll have to check their bug tracker to see if it's been reported.

Last edited by Zeroedout (2015-03-01 01:39:10)