Arch Linux

firbolg

Member

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 17

[CLOSED] UEFI / GPT conversion and needing some help please

Good night
I've been running an Arch / Win10 BIOS / MBR setup for quite a while and while not an expert I can usually sort out any issues.
I recently converted my setup to UEFI / GPT as I was experiencing booting issues which looked like maybe they were connected to
extended partitions in my setup.  About time to change anyway.
I converted the Win10 system and reinstalled Arch - a chance to clean it up. I'm booting with Systemd-boot.
All is good. Arch and WIn10 are both running fine.

I've been reading the WIKI and the various UEFI postings and I cannot find answers to the following:

1. If I need to restore the bootloader, is it just boot from live image,  and run bootctl --path=  install  ? (With MBR I would have run from live image and run grub-install & grub-mkconfig)
2. If (when) I do a kernel upgrade, do I need to do anything to the boot-loader or its' files? e.g copy files to /boot, change .conf entry etc
3. I am likely to install a 3rd Linux system occasionally for testing. My understaanding is that the main systems at least will cater for UEFI and will install a boot-loader and whatever other files / programs are needed.
Will this affect / replace my arch bootloader ? I obviously don't want my Arch system to become unbootable. Ideally I would like to stay with the Arch bootloader even with a 3rd system.

So far I have not found answers to these despite ploughing through the WIKI (systemd-boot, efibootmgr, etc), UEFI documentation, googling UEFI, Dual / multi-boot etc
If someone could point me towards the relevant docs or tutorials for these questions it would be very much appreciated.

Thank you
firbolg

Last edited by firbolg (2016-12-10 18:21:52)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,999

Website

Re: [CLOSED] UEFI / GPT conversion and needing some help please

1. Yes but be sure to check the boot order first with efibootmgr(8) as that can also be at the root of some boot problems.

2. If you are using systemd-boot and have /boot mounted to the ESP then kernel upgrades should proceed without any problems, no user intervention is required.

3. Most other distributions will mount the ESP to /boot/efi and will create a new NVRAM entry and place this first in the boot order, to fix this see my answer to your first question. The only problem with multi-booting is that systemd-boot will only start kernel images that are located on the EFI system partition. For my Debian systems I place a script at /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-esp to copy the kernel & initrd over after kernel upgrades but it may be simpler to just use GRUB instead.

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

firbolg

Member

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 17

Re: [CLOSED] UEFI / GPT conversion and needing some help please

Morning Head_on_a_Stick
Thank you for the quick response.

After my initial post and before I saw your reply, I installed Debian to see how it would go.
Debian install went fine but it replaced my systemd-boot menu with Debian's one, and Arch was not bootable (Windows was).
I was able to recover it by re-installing systemd-boot but I could not load Debian - just as you said.

I went with systemd-boot because the installation guide referred to it for UEFI systems.
I will read up again on Grub for UEFI to see whether I should switch.

Thank you again for the quick response. I will mark this closed tomorrow.

firbolg

firbolg

Member

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 17

Re: [CLOSED] UEFI / GPT conversion and needing some help please

Evening Head_on_a_Stick
Having read up again on Grub and UEFI etc, I will switch over to Grub from Systemd-Boot over the weekend.
It looks more straightforward and I have some familiarity with Grub.
Thanks again for your response.

firbolg

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,999

Website

Re: [CLOSED] UEFI / GPT conversion and needing some help please

You're welcome

For OpenBSD, the installer will detect the Arch ESP and mount it to /dev/sd0i and copy their .efi bootloader to $ESP/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI, this should only be a problem if your motherboard firmware is buggy and decides to boot this automatically.

For 9front, the installer exposes a FAT16 slice within the Plan 9 partition and this contains their .efi bootloader, also called BOOTX64.EFI

I think FreeBSD creates a separate ESP on it's slice but it's been a while since I used that.

For all those cases, the .efi bootloader can be copied to the Arch ESP (if needed) and a systemd-boot menu entry configured with:

# $ESP/loader/entries/openbsd.conf
title OpenBSD
efi /path/to/BOOTX64.EFI

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2016-12-09 22:39:19)

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî