Arch Linux

coffeed

Member

From: Toronto

Registered: 2014-08-23

Posts: 5

UEFI Boot Fail: No Valid File Available...

Hi all, I'm having a bit of trouble booting Arch after installing to an SD card (persistent install).

I used gdisk to create two partitions on a new SD card: first the 512MB EFI partition (ef00), then the Linux filesystem (8300) partition. Everything seemed fine, gdisk reported "MBR: protective" and "GPT: present".

After that, I ran mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdb1 for the ef00 partition and mkfs.ext4 -O "^has_journal" /dev/sdb2 for the 8300 partition.

Then I mounted the filesystems. Mounting failed on /dev/sdb2 at first but after running partprobe it succeeded and it was mounted to /mnt. Then /dev/sdb1 was mounted to /mnt/boot, and afterwards I went through the rest of the steps from the Installation Guide (i.e. pacstrap, configuring clock and locale, genfstab, etc.)

Everything seemed to be installed OK  and I can see initramfs-linux.img and vmlinuz-linux files in the /boot directory, can anyone explain to me why it's failing to boot? Thanks

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Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 7,732

Website

Re: UEFI Boot Fail: No Valid File Available...

What is your bootloader (or bootmanager) and how have you configured it?

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Are you infected with Wetiko?

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: UEFI Boot Fail: No Valid File Available...

Are you talking about an sd card on a laptop's card reader or an sd card in a usb adapter? If your are trying to use the card on a laptop's card reader you may be out of luck as the firmware does not have a driver for the card reader (unless it is connected over usb*). If it is on a usb adapter then something else is going on.

On another note, you may be trying to extend the card's life by not using a journal but that is a bad idea, if your system crashes or you don't shut it down cleanly it's a lot easier to have data loss or corruption. That said, once you've managed to get it working as it is and used it for some time if you are curious give f2fs a try.

*) That would be bad and you don't want that, it would mean you can't issue mmc erase commands, which are equivalent to ata trim. You really want to be able to use trim/discard with your sd card, it will help keep write speeds up.

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R00KIE
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coffeed

Member

From: Toronto

Registered: 2014-08-23

Posts: 5

Re: UEFI Boot Fail: No Valid File Available...

Thanks for the quick responses!

What is your bootloader (or bootmanager) and how have you configured it?

rEFInd using the refind.conf example from here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/RE … ot_stanzas

I have changed the volume value to the PARTUUID of /dev/sdb2 but no dice. I'm able to see the rEFInd menu now but am getting an "Invalid loader file" error.

Are you talking about an sd card on a laptop's card reader or an sd card in a usb adapter? If your are trying to use the card on a laptop's card reader you may be out of luck as the firmware does not have a driver for the card reader (unless it is connected over usb*). If it is on a usb adapter then something else is going on.

Yes I'm using a Kingston MobileLite G3 (USB 3) card reader, the installation media is also a similar SD card and it runs from the reader

On another note, you may be trying to extend the card's life by not using a journal but that is a bad idea, if your system crashes or you don't shut it down cleanly it's a lot easier to have data loss or corruption. That said, once you've managed to get it working as it is and used it for some time if you are curious give f2fs a try.

*) That would be bad and you don't want that, it would mean you can't issue mmc erase commands, which are equivalent to ata trim. You really want to be able to use trim/discard with your sd card, it will help keep write speeds up.

Thanks for the warning, I'm just experimenting with the setup so I don't mind if the data gets corrupted

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Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: UEFI Boot Fail: No Valid File Available...

Is that a USB-C card reader? Do you have any other card reader you can try, Any USB2 or "normal" USB3 card reader will do. The reason I'm asking is because I'm not sure if usb-c has any support issues that might still need some work.

You might also want to give other bootloaders a try, like systemd-boot and see if you get a different message, that would mean the problem is with the bootloader configuration and not the firmware being unable to find something and complaining.

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R00KIE
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