Arch Linux

twelveeighty

Member

Registered: 2011-09-04

Posts: 1,453

Toshiba Tecra refuses to boot from USB stick when in UEFI mode

Just to share some of my experiences today trying to get Arch installed on a brand new Toshiba Tecra. Some of these may be "well known", but I couldn't find any obvious Wiki entries about them.

[sidebar: I typically remove the harddrive that ships with the laptop and replace it with a better, bigger one, so the first problem is to find out how to get into the BIOS settings screen, since the laptop does not show a prompt for that. After some trial-n-error, this is F2, by the way. ]

In my case, the BIOS was set to CMS mode. After setting that to UEFI and changed the boot order to be USB Memory first, the laptop refuses to boot into an Arch bootable USB stick. I had prepped the stick using the "dd" method, as per the Wiki. Switching back to CMS mode, it does boot into the USB drive, but it's showing the Arch screen that you get when UEFI is not found.

However, after I had dusted off an external CD drive and burned the installation to CD, the laptop *does* boot into the Arch CD when in UEFI mode and it's showing the expected gummiboot menu with UEFI vars enabled. So to get Arch installed, you would either have to use a CD if you want to run UEFI, or switch the laptop BIOS to CMS and use legacy, in which case you can use a USB stick for the install.

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: Toshiba Tecra refuses to boot from USB stick when in UEFI mode

Let me throw seemingly random but probably related words around this thread:

secureboot