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John5788
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 14, 2013 9:47 am    Post subject: Gentoo Minimal ISO EFI Boot? Reply with quote

Is there a way to get the minimal install ISO onto a USB for EFI booting? I'm looking at the contents of the ISO and it looks like it has EFI images on it. Is it a simple dd onto my USB stick and it should boot on a UEFI system?
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John5788
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 14, 2013 10:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I might have just answered my own question.

I ran

Code:
# dd bs=4M if=install-amd64-minimal-20130801.iso of=/dev/sdc && sync


My UEFI laptop seemed to boot the USB stick without a problem. I will try on my new Haswell system tomorrow and report results.
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gemarcano
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 21, 2013 1:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Are you sure the USB in being booted in UEFI mode and not Legacy or CSM? I was not able to get it to boot in UEFI mode on my machines but it would boot in Legacy mode. I eventually resorted to installing Gentoo on the flashdrive in its own 3.5 GB ext4 partition and then have a 200 or 300 MB FAT32 partition to house the EFI boot folders (I installed rEFInd as the boot loader). I'm interested to see what your testing yields. Good luck!
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John5788
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 21, 2013 3:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm not sure if I booted EFI or not, I'm assuming I did. I simply dd'ed the image onto the USB drive which then had an EFI folder inside with a bootx64.img file. I plugged it into the system and it booted into Gentoo Minmal installer on the first try without complaints. Then I simply setup my EFI partition at the beginning of my drive as FAT32, installed my kernel as /boot/efi/boot/bootx64.efi with /boot mounted as my EFI partition, and the system booted the kernel as an EFI image. No grub here, I'm going straight from UEFI to kernel with nothing inbetween.
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d2_racing
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 22, 2013 12:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi, for a UEFI setup, I'm using the latest SystemRescueCD version USB or the usual DVD.
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Realnot
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 21, 2013 1:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi, i have the same problem, i'm not able to run the usb pendrive with the minimal cd iso image with the uefi mode. It's formatted ad fat 32 and with GPT table.. i followed this howto https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB_Flash_Installation_Media#BIOS_and_UEFI_Bootable_USB but nothing to do...
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 21, 2013 2:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There is precisely one OS installation task that requires a boot in EFI mode to accomplish: registering the boot loader with the firmware. There are ways to work around this task if you can't get a Gentoo installer to boot in EFI mode:


  • Do it using an EFI shell. See this Arch Linux wiki entry or the rEFInd documentation for details.
  • Do it from Windows. See the rEFInd documentation for an example using rEFInd.
  • Use a CD-R or USB flash drive version of rEFInd to get the computer booted the first time. There are limits and caveats, though; your kernel must be on a FAT, ext2/3/4fs, ReiserFS, or Btrfs partition, it must be called vmlinuz* or bzImage*, and if you use a separate /boot partition, you'll need to hit F2 or Insert twice and manually enter your root filesystem's path for the first boot.
  • Name the boot loader EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi (on an x86-64 system; EFI/BOOT/bootia32.efi on x86). This will work only if nothing else (like the Windows boot loader) is registered.


Aside from registering the boot loader, everything else you do in a Gentoo installation can be done in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode. Mostly it's partitioning the disk, creating filesystems, copying files, and adjusting configuration files.

All that said, there are plenty of bootable Linux CD-Rs (like System Rescue CD and the Ubuntu live CD) that can boot in EFI mode, so it should be possible to do the install in EFI mode. OTOH, some EFIs make it hard, or even impossible, to control the boot mode, so it may be tricky to get some media booted in the right mode on some computers.
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Realnot
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 21, 2013 8:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi, thanks for your reply, I apreciated. I'm just curious... why all this to boot a machine? for 6 years i worked with fdisk and grub (then grub2) without any problems. Now seems so hard to set it work properly... now the tools are gfdisk (for GPT table), UEFI (because it's cool) and so on. I just want to boot my machine like all other times, i need all of these? which are the pro and cons?

Thanks in advance!
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srs5694
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 21, 2013 11:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Realnot wrote:
why all this to boot a machine? for 6 years i worked with fdisk and grub (then grub2) without any problems. Now seems so hard to set it work properly... now the tools are gfdisk (for GPT table), UEFI (because it's cool) and so on. I just want to boot my machine like all other times, i need all of these? which are the pro and cons?


The problems we're seeing now are a result of several factors, most or all of which will ease significantly in another 1-5 years:


  • EFI is new, and therefore has lots of bugs that are causing problems.
  • EFI is new, and therefore people are unfamiliar with it. It's really not any harder than BIOS booting, and in fact it's superior in some ways; but long-time PC users have had so long to learn all of the BIOS quirks that they seem natural. EFI's quirks, OTOH, are new and unfamiliar, so they generate a lot of frustration and discussion.
  • EFI is new, and therefore OS support tools are immature compared to their BIOS counterparts.
  • Recent versions of EFI include a new feature, Secure Boot, that imposes new program requirements. Linux distributions have yet to completely adjust to this new feature. (Gentoo doesn't include either shim or PreLoader, the two Secure Boot solutions for Linux, in its repositories, for instance.) Despite what some people say, Secure Boot does have advantages, even on a Linux-only computer. For instance, you can configure your computer to never boot Windows or malware that might have somehow gotten signed with Microsoft's keys. At the moment, though, Secure Boot is enough of a hassle that many Linux users disable it entirely.
  • GPT is new, and therefore people are unfamiliar with it. (Note that gdisk isn't any harder to use than fdisk; it's just a different program.)
  • In an effort to be helpful, manufacturers are almost always providing a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) for booting in BIOS mode on EFI computers. Unfortunately, there are no standards in the GPT spec that detail how the CSM should be interfaced, in terms of user interface elements or when it should be employed. This creates complications because it's impossible to document when a computer will boot in BIOS mode vs. in EFI mode, and installation tools can also get confused on this score.


All of these "newness" factors will of course fade in time. The CSM issue may be with us for a while; or manufacturers may just stop shipping the CSM in another year or two, or maybe they'll start setting some standards about its use.
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Realnot
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 27, 2013 8:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for explanation, i appreciated it!!!! I setup my gentoo with grub2 and without GPT partition table. Now work properly and boot well :)
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