[NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

daedhel · 2012-01-10 20:58:34

Hi, just bought a brand new t420i.

Installed fresh new, from latest Archboot.

Used the automatic hd partitioning, enabeling GPT.

Installed Extlinux, selected to install to /dev/sda.

Now when I rebooted, Extlinux was not showing.

But if I boot from Archboot, and select "Boot from existing OS", I can boot my install.

I will provide additional information if requested, as I don't know what to add.

Thanks,

daedhel

Last edited by daedhel (2012-02-18 22:22:08)

Strike0 · 2012-01-13 19:11:23

If you can boot into it from the archboot, it can only be your bootloader config. "Extlinux was not showing" I don't understand, maybe you can clarify what you mean. If the bootloader is not loading, perhaps you only forgot to set the bootable flag on the boot partition.Or look here first.

the.ridikulus.rat · 2012-01-13 20:00:42

Similar problem https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=131149

daedhel · 2012-01-14 04:43:14

Strike0 wrote:

If you can boot into it from the archboot, it can only be your bootloader config. "Extlinux was not showing" I don't understand, maybe you can clarify what you mean. If the bootloader is not loading, perhaps you only forgot to set the bootable flag on the boot partition.Or look here first.

Don't worry, I have read all the related wikis until I got a headache.

As for the clarification, when I say "Extlinux was not showing", I mean that in fact, the bios just does not boot from the drive. Is seems it cannot find anything to boot from it, and switch to the next boot device from the boot order.

Is that more clear?

daedhel

Last edited by daedhel (2012-01-14 18:12:46)

daedhel · 2012-01-14 04:44:25

the.ridikulus.rat wrote:

Similar problem https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=131149

Thanks for you input.

I have read the thread but I am too noob to relate to 75% of what is said there.

Maybe you can tell me where to look in that thread exactly for a solution?

daedhel

Last edited by daedhel (2012-01-14 18:12:20)

Strike0 · 2012-01-14 09:33:04

daedhel wrote:

I have read the thread but I am too noob to relate to 75% of what is said there.
Maybe you can tell me where to look in that thread exactly for a solution?
daedhel

I think you mis-quote me instead of the thread quoted by the.ridukulus.rat? That one indeed has a lot of information in it.

Anyway, for anyone to give you input here, you must give a bit more information yourself:
1) Is your notebook using Uefi or not? T420
2) Which bootloader do you want to use? (syslinux?)
3) Whats the layout of the boot partition (or uefi system partition)?

I read somewhere that in case of Uefi, one has to use gparted to set partition type of the boot partition. Since that is not the case for the automatic arch hdd partitioning, that may well be your problem.
In that case you should read this. Its easy to use the archboot to fix that I would imagine.

Maybe someone else can confirm, if the automatic install works for hardware cases like yours or not. I have no experience with Uefi and GPT as of yet.

cfr · 2012-01-16 04:08:12

It may also be essential to know the firmware you're using.

Also, when you say that

... I mean that in fact, the bios just does not boot from the drive. Is seems it cannot find anything to boot from it, and switch to the next boot device from the boot order.

what _exactly_ do you see on the screen? What is the error message?

If you have the same version of bios from Lenovo as me and if you are trying to do roughly the same thing, I can tell you how to do it. That is, I can give you basically the conclusion of the thread concerning my install since I now know what worked in the end. But you should not do things that way otherwise because what worked for me violates the UEFI specification i.e. is a fix for buggy firmware and might well break things elsewhere rather than fixing them.

Note that I did not use archboot. But if your machine is similar to mine, I would expect the archboot automatic partitioning of the disk to fail to set things up in a way which will work. I would not expect it to work on my machine.

But I'm not familiar with "Extlinux" so it maybe that what I learnt cannot be of help to you anyway.

daedhel · 2012-02-08 04:05:23

Holy shit, I got a huge contract, and didn't have any time to fix this issue. I have been going around with my laptop booting from the CD because booting from the SDD was not possible. It was awkward.

Strike0 wrote:

I think you mis-quote me instead of the thread quoted by the.ridukulus.rat? That one indeed has a lot of information in it.

You're right. Read it all, but my limited knowledge does not allow me to follow exactly what is being tested and what could be a potential solution for my problem.

Strike0 wrote:

Anyway, for anyone to give you input here, you must give a bit more information yourself:
1) Is your notebook using Uefi or not? T420

It is both. UEFI is activated or disactivated in the bios. Right now it is set as to try UEFI first, and resolve to Legacy Bios if UEFI failed.

Strike0 wrote:

2) Which bootloader do you want to use? (syslinux?)

Yep.

3) Whats the layout of the boot partition (or uefi system partition)?

I'm not sure what you mean by "layout", so I grabbed some infos from Gparted. Hope this answers your questions:

http://i.imgur.com/BQby9.png

Strike0 wrote:

I read somewhere that in case of Uefi, one has to use gparted to set partition type of the boot partition. Since that is not the case for the automatic arch hdd partitioning, that may well be your problem.
In that case you should read this. Its easy to use the archboot to fix that I would imagine.

I don't need to chroot into the partition, since /boot/ is separated from the rest. Im going to unmount it right now, set the "boot" flag and reboot. BRB.

daedhel · 2012-02-08 05:08:54

This definatly did not work. I set the /boot/ partition mode as ef00, wich is uefi boot mode. Now I cant boot even with the CD.

daedhel · 2012-02-08 05:12:17

cfr wrote:

It may also be essential to know the firmware you're using.
Also, when you say that
... I mean that in fact, the bios just does not boot from the drive. Is seems it cannot find anything to boot from it, and switch to the next boot device from the boot order.
what _exactly_ do you see on the screen? What is the error message?
If you have the same version of bios from Lenovo as me and if you are trying to do roughly the same thing, I can tell you how to do it. That is, I can give you basically the conclusion of the thread concerning my install since I now know what worked in the end. But you should not do things that way otherwise because what worked for me violates the UEFI specification i.e. is a fix for buggy firmware and might well break things elsewhere rather than fixing them.
Note that I did not use archboot. But if your machine is similar to mine, I would expect the archboot automatic partitioning of the disk to fail to set things up in a way which will work. I would not expect it to work on my machine.
But I'm not familiar with "Extlinux" so it maybe that what I learnt cannot be of help to you anyway.

Thanks a lot for your answer!

Honnestly, I would rather use the legacy boot option than to have hack something because of bad firmware. This might just be wht I'm going to do, if I can find how.

daedhel · 2012-02-14 15:46:20

Hi,

I just found this thread,

https://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop/ … 00011.html

I don't know if anyone knows what's up with that?

Is it really the laptop bios that is wrong?

daedhel

cfr · 2012-02-15 00:34:32

daedhel wrote:

Honnestly, I would rather use the legacy boot option than to have hack something because of bad firmware. This might just be wht I'm going to do, if I can find how.

What I did in the end is not complicated and it is not hair-raising. It does not, for example, involve touching the firmware.

*If* you have the same buggy firmware I have, the solution is actually quite simple. You would just need to format the EFI boot partition as fat 16 rather than fat 32. This violates the UEFI spec. It should boot with fat 32 (and possibly other configurations but definitely this one). Mine doesn't, though. I also could not get it to boot in legacy bios mode with a GPT formatted disk. The two configurations which worked for me were:
- format disk MBR, bios boot (didn't actually try uefi boot with this) - this is the default set up with the standard Arch installer (not Archboot)
- format disk GPT, partition for uefi boot *except* format the efi partition fat 16 rather than fat 32, uefi boot

The reason I was reluctant to suggest this is because you mentioned not following the thread concerning my config issues and although it isn't necessary to follow most of that to use the solution, that solution is a work around for buggy firmware. So I didn't want you to go off and try it and maybe just make things worse if the problem really lies elsewhere. Other firmware could quite legitimately refuse to boot with the fat 16 format because the spec does not require that to work. I didn't want you to introduce a second problem on account of my suggestion.

Check the version of your firmware in the bios and compare it with mine. I would be surprised if the issue was unique to x121e and didn't affect some other Lenovo models, though one never knows.

Of course, you may prefer to use the legacy boot. That's fine but if your firmware is like mine, that will require you to use a MBR partition map. I didn't want to do that and I would have wanted to do that even less if I was the owner of an SSD.

Everything else in that thread is either me making mistakes, me asking questions because I don't know what I'm doing or me trying various suggestions which didn't work because nobody, quite understandably, thought to suggest formatting in a way unsupported by the spec. But if that's what your firmware needs, it is all really quite simple and straightforward. Once you know that's what it wants...

cfr · 2012-02-15 00:48:03

Note: If you have the same model and firmware as mentioned at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=135518, don't format your EFI partition as I did. The script linked to from that thread (which the OP said worked for getting UEFI boot working on the OP's machine) formats it according to the spec as far as I can tell. If that's right, I doubt that your problem is the same as mine and so would not recommend trying my solution for the reasons explained above.

daedhel · 2012-02-18 22:23:54

The Thinkpad T420i is unable to boot a ssd with a gpt partition.

If you find yourself in my situation, use MBR partition, and curse the lazy engineers who implement this shitty bios in the ThinkPad.

cfr · 2012-02-19 01:38:57

daedhel wrote:

The Thinkpad T420i is unable to boot a ssd with a gpt partition.
If you find yourself in my situation, use MBR partition, and curse the lazy engineers who implement this shitty bios in the ThinkPad.

Sorry to hear that.

Could you post your bios name and version (from the uefi/bios setup screen) so that others with the same bios can identify it?

Do you have a reference for the statement that it cannot boot a ssd with a gpt map? That would likely help people who might want to work on work arounds etc.

David Batson · 2012-02-19 03:37:50

I saw this for an X220 and GPT. Might be similar for the T420i.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installin … nkPad_X220

This guy says it did it on a T420...
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=124183

Jesse2004 · 2012-06-25 14:31:38

I have a ThinkPad Edge E425, similar problem. I've got gpt on a 1TB usb hard drive, extlinux as bootloader. It boots fine on any other machines tested except THIS ONE.

My solution is, make the protected MBR "USB-ZIP"-like：64 heads，32 sectors，a single bootable 4th partition.

The command "sfdisk -f -H 64 -S 32 /dev/sdb" does the job for me.

PS: other two things to check:

1、use gptmbr.bin, not mbr.bin

2、use sgdisk to set the BIOS-bootable flag

Last edited by Jesse2004 (2012-06-25 14:52:46)

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-10 20:58:34

[NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#2 2012-01-13 19:11:23

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#3 2012-01-13 20:00:42

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#4 2012-01-14 04:43:14

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#5 2012-01-14 04:44:25

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#6 2012-01-14 09:33:04

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#7 2012-01-16 04:08:12

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#8 2012-02-08 04:05:23

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#9 2012-02-08 05:08:54

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#10 2012-02-08 05:12:17

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#11 2012-02-14 15:46:20

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#12 2012-02-15 00:34:32

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#13 2012-02-15 00:48:03

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#14 2012-02-18 22:23:54

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#15 2012-02-19 01:38:57

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#16 2012-02-19 03:37:50

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

#17 2012-06-25 14:31:38

Re: [NOTFIXED]ThinkPad T420i + gpt + extlinux = bios doesn't boot Extlinux

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