Arch Linux

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,291

Is it worth updating the wiki for this?

I'm experimenting with a portable Win 10 installation, via virtualbox on an (as minimal as I dare) Arch base. My Desktop already does, and has for years been running Arch. I tried installing the base system to an external HD via a VM, but couldn't get it to boot, and so decided to do a direct, live install to the external HD. To be sure I didn't install to a wrong drive, I disconnected all 6 internal drives, and got the base install done.

Reconnected the internal drives, to get a non-booting system. GRUB2 problem was my first thought (and I was correct), but try as I might, a quick re-install after chrooting (arch-chroot) has taken the wrong side of two hours to get going. Now, my issue was I was using arch-chroot from my portable arch drive, which is deliverately setup as a BIOS boot to make it as compatible with any H/W as possible. Unfortunately, booting this version means I cannot succesfuuly reinstall my UEFI boot on my desktop.

I got there in the end, booting a USB stick ARCH install drive, but nowhere in the wiki does it mention that booting from a BIOS boot drive will mean that you can't reinstall a UEFI grub (doesn't support EFI vars is the error). I could have saved myself 3 hours had I known.

So is it worth updating the wiki, or is it too niche to bother?

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus B550-F Gaming MB, 128Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (2 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

/ is the root of all problems.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,330

Website

Re: Is it worth updating the wiki for this?

I think it's pretty clearly covered already in a few locations, e.g.

Installing the EFI boot manager
To install the systemd-boot EFI boot manager, first make sure the system has booted in UEFI mode and that UEFI variables are accessible. This can be checked by running the command efivar --list.

And

When installing to use UEFI it is important to boot the installation media in UEFI mode

Last edited by Trilby (2019-08-19 20:53:27)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,493

Website

Re: Is it worth updating the wiki for this?

nowhere in the wiki does it mention that booting from a BIOS boot drive will mean that you can't reinstall a UEFI grub (doesn't support EFI vars is the error).

I think It's possible to install a UEFI GRUB bootloader from a non-UEFI live system by passing the --removable option to the grub-install command.

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Para todos todo, para nosotros nada

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,270

Re: Is it worth updating the wiki for this?

I think It's possible to install a UEFI GRUB bootloader from a non-UEFI live system by passing the --removable option to the grub-install command.

And bootctl (systemd-boot) has the --no-variables parameter, that might work.

With GRUB2 there is a --no-nvram option as well. If you want to recreate a fixed installation that might be better than the removable option. removable will install to the default path /EFI/BOOTx64.EFI instead of the grub path /EFI/grubx64.efi which is required for automatic bootloader detection on removable drives without entry in the EFI boot table. If you do that and the boot entry in the EFI is missing, you'll have to find the option to run a specific efi executable in your UEFI system, boot in efi mode and then create the entry.

Edit: And you can try to create a hybrid-mbr/gpt usb drive: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mu … T/MBR_boot

Last edited by progandy (2019-08-19 21:43:28)

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Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,291

Re: Is it worth updating the wiki for this?

I think it's pretty clearly covered already in a few locations, e.g.

Installing the EFI boot manager
To install the systemd-boot EFI boot manager, first make sure the system has booted in UEFI mode and that UEFI variables are accessible. This can be checked by running the command efivar --list.

And

When installing to use UEFI it is important to boot the installation media in UEFI mode

Hell, how did I miss that, not once, but several times

Well, to be fair to me, I only looked at the GRUB page, but even so........

Last edited by Roken (2019-08-19 23:45:14)

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus B550-F Gaming MB, 128Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (2 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

/ is the root of all problems.