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I installed Arch from CD to the physical hard drive attached to the virtual box VM. It boots fine in VM in virtual box. Using Syslinux. GPT on one partition spanning the whole disk.
However, when I move the hard drive to the laptop it doesn't boot at all. Symptom is exactly like described here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=176185
It drops into "Intel UNDI. PXE-2.1 (build 083)", and offers netboot only. My guess is that it doesn't recognize Arch boot record (which boots fine in VM).
The next idea is that this might be UEFI bios and it requires UEFI setup. So I followed this http://edoceo.com/howto/syslinux-uefi, but efibootmgr comamnd always fails, which means that this is not UEFI:
efibootmgr: EFI variables are not supported on this system.
Now I am stuck. The Ubuntu distro worked fine on the same laptop. And FreeBSD also worked fine.
How to make Arch boot from the hard drive?
(I actually did the same many times: installed in VM on the attached HD, then moved HD to computer, and it always worked before)
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Did you confirm that the drive is before network boot in the boot order in BIOS?
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Did you enable efi support on virtual box when you installed?
If not you are in BIOS mode.
I put at button on it. Yes. I wish to press it, but I'm not sure what will happen if I do. (Gune | Titan A.E.)
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(I got lured here from syslinux mailing list)
Were the successful installations with GPT partitioning,
too ?
The JPEG image at the end of
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=176185
looks like a messed up MBR partition table. Block
addresses more than twice as high as the disk size.
Maybe "Intel UNDI. PXE-2.1 (build 083)" is the
symptom of an undigestible MBR partition table.
If your PC-BIOS does not understand GPT, and the GPT
was made properly, then your PC-BIOS will see the
"protective MBR" partition. It is supposed to start at
block 1 (CHS 0/0/2), whereas your GPT partition cannot
start before block 3. (MBR, GPT header, and smallest
possible GPT partition table each eat a block.)
In this case your PC-BIOS sees a single DOS partition with
no boot/active bit. So it it might think there is no
boot software on the device.
What happens if you partition the disk by MBR
and install again ?
(Or replace the MBR partition by one that marks
the same range as the GPT partition and has the
active/bootable flag set.)
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I found the reason - 4 yo laptop did't know about GPT. So when I forced MBR, it worked like a charm.
Somebody should update section "Choosing between GPT and MBR" here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pa … PT_and_MBR :
*If computer doesn't boot with GPT, and it is several years old, please try MBR as its BIOS might not support GPT.
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Maybe one should generally advise MBR for BIOS machines
with disks smaller than 2 TiB.
(The site https://wiki.archlinux.org hands out accounts to
everybody.)
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I added this item to wiki. I wouldn't mention the hard drive size because the problem is specific to BIOS, not disk. It is related to the age of hardware.
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The 2 TiB limit is one of the disadvantages of MBR partitioning
in comparison to GPT.
MBR uses 32 bit to express start block and number of blocks
in a partition. Together with block size 512 this yields 2 TiB of
hassle-free addressing. (You can push the addressable range to
nearly 4 TiB if you start the last partition at nearly 2 TiB.
Question is whether reader software will support that trick.)
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