[SOLVED] UEFI boot process too complex after successful installation

Tha-Fox · 2012-10-23 20:46:43

Resolution: Corrected menu entry creation with correct parameters.

I just did a fresh installation. I've done several installations before but this was my first time with UEFI and GPT. During the installation I followed Beginner's Guide and UEFI Bootloaders. I chose rEFInd as my boot manager and EFISTUB as boot loader. The installation went fine but somehow my boot process is quite complicated. The process goes like this:

1) Power on and POST.
2a) If I let the laptop continue I get "Non-system disk or disk error".
2b) If I press f9 and choose Arch Linux (Grub2) as my booting device I get instantly "Boot failed" and when I press something I return to choosing booting device.
2c) If I choose "Boot from EFI file" I get the menu where the only entry is my hard disk and I assume it represents my UEFI system partition.
3) After taking 2c I see file explorer and I navigate to EFI/refind/ and choose refindx64.efi
4) I see rEFInd and choose Arch Linux to boot.
5) Systemd starts services and I get to login.

I assume this could be more streamlined but I'm not sure how to proceed. My ultimate goal is to press the power button, wait a second and log in.

I tried to tackle the first problem with the booting device. My laptop is HP 6530B which is about 3 years old. I read that it supports UEFI and went to BIOS to enable UEFI boot mode. This is fine but now when I go to BIOS to change boot order I can't see "boot from EFI file" anywhere. Is there some UEFI settings I could get to change that to be the default? The manual of the laptop doesn't mention anything like that.

Where did that menu entry in 2b) come from? Is that supposed to work or did I fail to follow the guides somewhere and created menu entry that shouldn't even exist?

Remember that this is my first time with UEFI so I may have misunderstood something big time.

Last edited by Tha-Fox (2012-10-24 11:20:41)

the.ridikulus.rat · 2012-10-23 21:19:39

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … es_Support

WonderWoofy · 2012-10-24 06:26:53

You post was full of great information on why your setup sucks to boot. I think you obviously did something wrong, but without information on what you did and how you configured it, you are never going to get real help here.

Tha-Fox · 2012-10-24 09:20:21

Thank you both for your answers!

I think I found the reason.I had one misunderstanding and maybe a typo when creating menu entry. During installation I used this

efibootmgr -c -g -d /dev/sda -p 3 -w -L "rEFInd" -l '\EFI\refind\refindx64.efi'

although I should have done it like this

efibootmgr -c -g -d /dev/sda -p 1 -w -L "Arch testi1" -l \\EFI\\refind\\refindx64.efi

The problems were:

1) Partition number was wrong. I had put the number of root partition instead of EFI partition.
2) I'm not quite sure whether it's an error to path with single backslashes surrounded with single quotes. I copied that command from the latter guide used.

Now I created the new boot menu entry with the beforementioned line and when I press power button, I see rEFInd and it boots my Arch Linux. Problem solved and new lessons learnt!

Arch Linux

#1 2012-10-23 20:46:43

[SOLVED] UEFI boot process too complex after successful installation

#2 2012-10-23 21:19:39

Re: [SOLVED] UEFI boot process too complex after successful installation

#3 2012-10-24 06:26:53

Re: [SOLVED] UEFI boot process too complex after successful installation

#4 2012-10-24 09:20:21

Re: [SOLVED] UEFI boot process too complex after successful installation

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