UEFI does not detect SSD as bootable

sandsong · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2013 Posts: 2

I have an ASUS K45VD, with an AMI Aptio BIOS

I've got a Kingston SSD. The BIOS detects it alright, listing it as a SATA device. It's all connected, so I doubt it's a hardware issue. There is about 178kB at the start of the disk that I can't partition, however.

I can install Gentoo fine, however, my BIOS does not detect the installation as bootable.

Finally, my last working install was openSuSE 12.2, from a DVD. The BIOS detected this as bootable as either "P2" or UEFI. Having failed to get Gentoo bootable, I tried reinstalling from a thumb drive, which is only being detected as P2. This SuSE installation is similarly unbootable.

Also, there are no EFI files in the install from the SuSE thumb drive.

Now, given that SuSE is installed but unbootable, is there any way I can make a device that will boot in UEFI mode and allow me to chroot into the SuSE install and hence get a UEFI-bootable Gentoo live USB? I suspect this will fix the issue.

DONAHUE · Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 6:43 pm Post subject:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html is good reference material
_________________
Defund the FCC.

srs5694 · Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 12:57 am Post subject:

I'm afraid you've provided next to no useful diagnostic details. I recommend you download the Boot Info Script and run it on your system. It will produce a file called RESULTS.txt. Post that here, either between code tags or as a link. That will provide useful diagnostic information. Also, add the output of typing "efibootmgr -v" as root from an EFI-mode boot of the computer. (System Rescue CD can boot in EFI mode, if you don't have any working EFI-mode Linux installation.)

koopdi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Feb 2011 Posts: 100

I just got UEFI boot working on an asrock motherboard. I ended up using efi shell as a basic bootloader. I compiled my kernel with EFI stub support but no internal command line. An EFI shell script passes the root and initrd parameters and launches the kernel on power on.

You should be able to install gentoo from the usb drive and boot it using EFI shell. From there, you have options as to adding different bootloaders or just adding kernel.efi to the UEFI boot menu without any boot loader. Does that help?

Mr.EVIL · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2013 Posts: 10

may be you have EFI which is not compatible with MBR and require to use GPT instead ?

sandsong · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2013 Posts: 2

Sorry about the late reply, I've been having too much fun getting Gentoo set up.

The issue, first up, was that the inbuilt boot manager only detects DVDs/CDs, or hard disks and USBs with an EFI boot partition.

I made a slight change to the install procedure in the handbook: I used fdisk to partition the drive, giving my boot partition the EF00 flag, and giving it a fat32 filesystem. I then proceeded through the handbook's instructions as normal.

After this, using SysRescCD, I was able to boot in EFI mode, chroot into my install, and install grub2. Everything booted fine after that.

Voltago · Posted: Wed Mar 27, 2013 6:39 pm Post subject:

Just a quick-and-dirty solution for the Gentoo user in a hurry who doesn't want to read through heaps of material: You can use an openSuSE 12.3 installation DVD (or probably also the latest Ubuntu or Fedora releases) to partition your setup, then install openSuSE (it deals with the dirty details of creating an UEFI boot entry, i. e. using efibootmgr and hopefully working around known firmware bugs), and finally replace the system partition contents with gentoo and on your EFI partition /EFI/opensuse/grubx64.efi with your own grub image created according to this guide:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~scarabeus/grub-2-guide.xml
Be wary of errors and omissions in this document, e. g. where it says