Installation Problem - Gummiboot

ncage · 2015-03-24 18:19:50

OK i'm going to wipe my main workstation and replace windows 8 (good riddens) with arch. I thought it smart to go through the installation routine (Beginner's Guide in arch wiki) in vmware workstation 11 before attempting to do my main workstation. I got most of the way through the process but i'm hung up on gummiboot. I switched the bios on vmware to be UEFI so as to replicate as closely as i could the install experience (my workstation has an UEFI bios).

Here is how i formatted the drive:
sda
---sda1 299M /boot (formatted with ext4)
---sda2 300M SWAP
---sda3 512M ef00 (formatted with FAT32)
--sda4 58.9G / (formatted with ext4)

i'm chrooted in and when i execute the following command
"gummiboot --path=/boot install"

i get the following error
"FIle system /boot is not a FAT EFI System Partition (ESP) file system."

huh? There wasn't any requirement to making /boot a FAT partition. I formatted the ef00 partition with FAT32 (sda3).

Just in case there is any question yes i mounted / & /boot. I have activated swap. The only partition i didn't specifically mount was sda3.

Any help would be appreciated.

Raynman · 2015-03-24 18:32:11

Read the wiki. Beginners' guide, gummiboot and efistub pages all have something to say about mounting the ESP at /boot.

teateawhy · 2015-03-24 21:38:12

The path argument to gummiboot must point to the fat32 esp.

ncage · 2015-03-24 23:01:14

Raynman wrote:

Read the wiki. Beginners' guide, gummiboot and efistub pages all have something to say about mounting the ESP at /boot.

No offense but what was the purpose of your reply? It was essentially useless and quite snarky. Can't you tell from my post that i "was" reading the wiki? I could reply to every single thread on the the forums with "read the wiki".

Though the wiki is EXTREMELY helpful its quite dense and its very easy to either miss or misunderstand something especially for the novice linux user.

ncage · 2015-03-24 23:05:43

teateawhy wrote:

The path argument to gummiboot must point to the fat32 esp.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't see anywhere on the wiki (unless i missed it which is very possible) to mount the ef00 partition. Should i have mounted it to /mnt/boot/EFI during the early stages of the install:

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/boot/EFI?

jasonwryan · 2015-03-24 23:06:51

ncage wrote:

Raynman wrote:
Read the wiki. Beginners' guide, gummiboot and efistub pages all have something to say about mounting the ESP at /boot.
No offense but what was the purpose of your reply? It was essentially useless and quite snarky. Can't you tell from my post that i "was" reading the wiki? I could reply to every single thread on the the forums with "read the wiki".
Though the wiki is EXTREMELY helpful its quite dense and its very easy to either miss or misunderstand something especially for the novice linux user.

Relax. Raynman pointed you in the right direction... And the fact that is dense is no excuse to not read (and re-read) it.

ncage · 2015-03-25 18:21:50

jasonwryan wrote:

ncage wrote:
Raynman wrote:
Read the wiki. Beginners' guide, gummiboot and efistub pages all have something to say about mounting the ESP at /boot.
No offense but what was the purpose of your reply? It was essentially useless and quite snarky. Can't you tell from my post that i "was" reading the wiki? I could reply to every single thread on the the forums with "read the wiki".
Though the wiki is EXTREMELY helpful its quite dense and its very easy to either miss or misunderstand something especially for the novice linux user.
Relax. Raynman pointed you in the right direction... And the fact that is dense is no excuse to not read (and re-read) it.

I was relaxed (not angry) and again i wasn't trying to be rude at all. Maybe my tone was misleading. If i would have been one of those users that wanted everyone to do my work and wasn't reading the wiki i could have understood the reply i got from raynman. I just think that jumping on questions and saying "read the wiki" can be off putting to newbies and can cause drop off which i'm sure no one wants. The bigger the arch community the better.

And on to my problem. I figured it out. I want to have a record here just in case anyone runs into the same problem (which i'm sure some will) Though i think it should be directly addressed in the wiki and really wasn't (maybe when i have time i will update the wiki). What clued me in was the following statement in the gummiboot part of the wiki:
" It is therefore strongly recommended to mount your ESP to /boot if you use gummiboot."

Other places suggest making a separate boot partition and pretty much state formatted it however you please (i used ext4 originally). So i changed what i originally had to
sda
--->sda1 (ef00) /boot 512MiB (formatted with FAT32)
---->sda2 (SWAP) 500MiB
---->sda3 (ext4) / 50G

So the moral of the story if your bios is UEFI & your going to use the gummiboot boot loader then mount your (ef00 or EFI System Partition) as your /boot partition. Don't create a separate boot partition.

Raynman · 2015-03-25 19:24:45

[Edit: please prepend [SOLVED] to your title.]

ncage wrote:

What clued me in was the following statement in the gummiboot part of the wiki:
" It is therefore strongly recommended to mount your ESP to /boot if you use gummiboot."

Guess what I was trying to point you at with

Raynman wrote:

Beginners' guide, gummiboot and efistub pages all have something to say about mounting the ESP at /boot.

You keep talking about my reply as if that second sentence wasn't there (if it wasn't enough of a hint, you could have asked), so apparently the "read the wiki" did put you off. It's just a quick reply to let you know the info is there and hint at the relevant part. Sure I could have said "reread" or "you seem to have missed some stuff", but there was no snarkiness intended.

ncage wrote:

If i would have been one of those users that wanted everyone to do my work and wasn't reading the wiki i could have understood the reply i got from raynman.

After you get this error, I would expect you to reread the wiki page to see if you missed something or google the error message (which brings up threads that discuss mounting the ESP at /boot and people getting in trouble because they didn't, not unlike you) or maybe look closer at what gummiboot expects for --path (man page or something). I don't see much of that in the OP.

You are right that not everything in the wiki is easy to find, so I'm happy to point to relevant parts if I know where to find it, but I'm not usually going to do much more if the answer is already available. In this case, to be perfectly honest, I find it hard to see how you could have missed it, but you're new and you were at least looking at the wiki, so I chose not to ignore you completely.

ncage wrote:

Though i think it should be directly addressed in the wiki and really wasn't (maybe when i have time i will update the wiki).

That was true when I tried UEFI booting for the first time, but now it seems pretty good. You said you were using the beginners' guide, so you must have gotten that gummiboot commandline from the following part:

Beginners' Guide wrote:

Note:
For UEFI boot, the drive needs to be GPT-partitioned and an EFI System Partition (512 MiB or larger, gdisk type EF00, formatted with FAT32) must be present. In the following examples, this partition is assumed to be mounted at /boot. If you have followed this guide from the beginning, you have already done all of these.
It is strongly recommended to have the EFI System Partition mounted at /boot as this is required to automatically update Gummiboot.
Install the gummiboot package and run the automated installation script, replacing $esp with the location of your EFI System Partiton, usually /boot:
# pacman -S gummiboot
# gummiboot --path=$esp install

There's a note and that sentence before the command (and the name of variable) and like the note says, it has been mentioned a couple times before in the guide. You quoted a sentence from the gummiboot page; that one is preceded by a short explanation as to why it is recommend and in the updating section this is discussed again. What more do you want? (not necessarily a rhetorical question) Is it possible that you simply hadn't completely wrapped your head around the concept of an EFI system partition?

Last edited by Raynman (2015-03-25 19:28:31)

nullified · 2015-03-25 19:43:35

ncage wrote:

I just think that jumping on questions and saying "read the wiki" can be off putting to newbies and can cause drop off which i'm sure no one wants. The bigger the arch community the better.

See here in that regard: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Th … er-centric

cptr13 · 2015-03-28 14:17:34

I just went through this and had missed the following:
(parted) mklabel gpt

Hope that helps...

Arch Linux

#1 2015-03-24 18:19:50

Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#2 2015-03-24 18:32:11

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#3 2015-03-24 21:38:12

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#4 2015-03-24 23:01:14

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#5 2015-03-24 23:05:43

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#6 2015-03-24 23:06:51

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#7 2015-03-25 18:21:50

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#8 2015-03-25 19:24:45

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#9 2015-03-25 19:43:35

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

#10 2015-03-28 14:17:34

Re: Installation Problem - Gummiboot

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