Arch Linux

lianzi2000

Member

Registered: 2018-02-20

Posts: 7

A very specific issue booting installation usb in UEFI mode..

I am trying to install arch linux on my fairly old Toshiba laptop (L855). Since it is capable of UEFI booting, I would like to boot from a USB in UEFI mode and install arch as such. I created the installation media which should be (and it is, as tested on other computers) able to boot in either BIOS (CSM) or UEFI mode. However the Toshiba has trouble boot in UEFI mode, It can boot the Arch USB stick in CSM mode, but in UEFI mode, it keeps rebooting after displayed the Toshiba logo. The USB stick can boot into UEFI on other computers and correctly displays the grub menu, only the Toshiba has problem. Meanwhile, the Toshiba is able to boot windows PE based USB drive in UEFI mode without any problem.

While this problem is very specific to the Toshiba laptop and possibly hard to solve, Would it be possible to boot the usb with CSM but still install Arch to boot in UEFI mode?

Thanks in advance.

lianzi2000

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: A very specific issue booting installation usb in UEFI mode..

Have you disabled SecureBoot?

It's pretty simple to convert a system to UEFI booting, especially with GRUB, but it shouldn't be needed.

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

lianzi2000

Member

Registered: 2018-02-20

Posts: 7

Re: A very specific issue booting installation usb in UEFI mode..

Have you disabled SecureBoot?
It's pretty simple to convert a system to UEFI booting, especially with GRUB, but it shouldn't be needed.

I certainly did. Since the computer can boot other disks in UEFI mode and the Arch USB can boot in UEFI mode on other computers, I think there is a very subtle incompatibility between the Toshiba laptop and Arch media. I have also tried the 202205 version and using Rufus to create the USB media, same thing happens.

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: A very specific issue booting installation usb in UEFI mode..

Did you try using dd, cp or cat to transfer the ISO image? Rufus is [redacted].

If you want to try installing in non-UEFI mode use a GUID partition table and add a BIOS boot partition (type "ef02" in gdisk) between sectors 34-2047 for GRUB's non-UEFI core.img (do not format) along with an EFI system partition (type "ef00", FAT formatted, 512MiB will be plenty).

Once the system is installed and booting in non-UEFI mode mount the ESP under /efi, add a line to /etc/fstab for it (the x-systemd.automount option is recommend here) then use

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --removable

That should get the system booting in UEFI mode as long as there are no extant NVRAM entries.

---

Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

lianzi2000

Member

Registered: 2018-02-20

Posts: 7

Re: A very specific issue booting installation usb in UEFI mode..

Did you try using dd, cp or cat to transfer the ISO image? Rufus is [redacted].

If you want to try installing in non-UEFI mode use a GUID partition table and add a BIOS boot partition (type "ef02" in gdisk) between sectors 34-2047 for GRUB's non-UEFI core.img (do not format) along with an EFI system partition (type "ef00", FAT formatted, 512MiB will be plenty).

Once the system is installed and booting in non-UEFI mode mount the ESP under /efi, add a line to /etc/fstab for it (the x-systemd.automount option is recommend here) then use

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --removable

That should get the system booting in UEFI mode as long as there are no extant NVRAM entries.

I did try dd mode, still no luck.

Eventually, I created a bootable DVD from the ISO file, which (somewhat surprisingly)  can boot in UEFI mode and let me install the system with UEFI boot, using EFIStub. Everything is good now. Thanks for the help.

a small problem still exists: when boot from the DVD, the grub menu did not show. The screen is blank, until the default entry is executed after timeout.

Last edited by lianzi2000 (2023-01-03 01:48:43)