Arch Linux

andmars

Member

Registered: 2012-03-13

Posts: 367

[SOLVED] efibootmgr - cleaning up entries

Greetings,

today I did a fresh UEFI installation with the new 2013.03.01 image and it was nice to see that the UEFI bug that prevented me from booting into UEFI directly from the .iso image was gone. ("No loader found. Configuration files in \loader\entries\*.conf are needed.").

So I followed the great arch wiki and especially the UEFI sections about gpt-partitioning, installing and copying files using EFISTUB and rEFInd;

sda                                                      
├─sda1 vfat         80D2-39E5                            /boot/efi
├─sda2 ext4         602d84d2-05df-4cf1-bc5c-1779efbd5990 /
└─sda3 ext4         0f0f659a-05d6-45ce-9e1f-907682ac97a0 /home
sr0

then came the part about efibootmgr;

efibootmgr -c -g -d /dev/sdX -p Y -w -L "rEFInd" -l '\EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi'

this didn't work during installation so I unmounted the drives and rebooted. The system didn't boot from harddrive. I had to boot from the CD and chroot into the system to try again. This time it worked but it complained about dublicates. And since I repeated the above line a few times I now have numbers like 0006 and 0007.

BootCurrent: 0006
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0006,0007,0002,0000
Boot0000  rEFInd
Boot0002  Hard Drive 
Boot0006* rEFInd
Boot0007* CD/DVD-Laufwerk

To be clear: Arch boots just fine now but I'd like to clean these boot entries up a little. I've read the man pages about efibootmgr but I'm a little scared to change things manually.

My question is: What's the best way to clean things up here? Renumber 0006 and 0007 with different numbers? Delete Boot0000 rEFInd? What would an ideal boot-order look like? Which entries do I really need? And is there a way to completely start over and have efibootmgr create fresh entries?

Thanks for your help.

Last edited by andmars (2013-03-14 20:13:29)

s1ln7m4s7r

Member

Registered: 2013-02-22

Posts: 262

Re: [SOLVED] efibootmgr - cleaning up entries

You can use efibootmgr to delete efi entries, change boot order, etc.

http://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr

andmars

Member

Registered: 2012-03-13

Posts: 367

Re: [SOLVED] efibootmgr - cleaning up entries

yes, that's the man page. but I'm not sure what a good boot order would looke like. Should I do it like this? (and do I need "Hard Drive" entry?)

BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0001
Boot0000*  rEFInd
Boot0001* CD/DVD-Laufwerk

Last edited by andmars (2013-03-14 19:44:03)

s1ln7m4s7r

Member

Registered: 2013-02-22

Posts: 262

Re: [SOLVED] efibootmgr - cleaning up entries

About the "Hard Drive" entry if you have linux you don't really need it, but with windows i really don't know if it creates it own efi entry or relies on the "Hard Drive" entry. My advise is to keep that entry and move it to the end of the boot order.

EDIT: And you can setup your entries like that, but i also advise to keep de DVD media entry first, just in case (you never know)

Last edited by s1ln7m4s7r (2013-03-14 19:55:37)

andmars

Member

Registered: 2012-03-13

Posts: 367

Re: [SOLVED] efibootmgr - cleaning up entries

ok, I was bold enough to simply delete ALL the entries and repeated;

efibootmgr -c -g -d /dev/sdX -p Y -w -L "rEFInd" -l '\EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi'

after reboot the settings for "CD/DVD Drive" and "Hard Drive" come back automatically making it look like this;

BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0001,0002
Boot0000* rEFInd
Boot0001* CD/DVD-Laufwerk 
Boot0002  Festplatte

I simply had to change the boot order from 00001,00002,0000 to 0000,0001,0002.