The hunt for an unbroken distro: Is Gentoo for me?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I hate to interject when there are already a lot of people offering help, but I haven't seen it verified that grub was set up correctly (what used to be the MBR if that has changed).

Also, I'm using legacy BIOS with GPT (per Handbook "strong suggestion" to do so) and I don't see a boot flag):

Naib · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 7:16 am Post subject:

Exactly..

There are snippets of info to questions but not a definitive statement

What is clearly known is: legacy BIOS booting and GPT layout

Some BIOS still need the bootable flag set and the type needs to be EF02

https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/bios.html

Your bios-grub is ef02 (good) but your /boot is ef00 indicating it is efi partition. I wonder if your bios is funky and sees that and the tries todo efi even though you disabled ., It fails then finally does legacy
_________________

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 11:02 am Post subject:

pun_guin,

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Stop it with the bootable flag. GPT partition tables do not have one. At all. You can't set it.

Things we know:

Your bios is not EFI-aware.
You have a GPT partition table.
You have an EF02 partition of 2MB.
You have an EF00 partition of 512MB.
You have SWAP and / partitions.

I would suggest changing your EF00 partition over to Linux (same as /) because back in the lilo days that's what you did.

That /boot partition should be formatted ext3 because none of the features of ext4 make any difference on this partition and you don't need the extra overhead.

pun_guin · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 204

Hey, NeddySeagoon,

Naib · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 2:57 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 3:29 pm Post subject:

pun_guin,

Maybe some history will aid understanding. Hard drives started out as miniaturised floppies and were controlled the same way.
They used the Cylinder/Head/Sector addressing mechanism, which is still in the BIOS today.
The sector is the smallest region oh a hard drive that can be addressed. Also known as a block.
A Head reads/writes one surface of a platter and was moved in and out with a stepper motor.
The heads all move together, which defines a vertical annular piece of the drive known as a cylinder.

Vendors designed HDD with wildly different C/H/S counts but the access software needed to know it. At one time, you read the CHS counts off the drive label and entered it into a BIOS table. That was a long time ago.
Out of all these wildly different designs, the convention was that partition 1 always started on Cylinder 0, Head 1 Sector 0. That means that after the MBR, in Cylinder 0, Head 0 Sector 0 that was always some unallocated space. Almost a whole track. Hang on to that thought.

As drives grew, the Logical Block Addressing scheme was introduced and the physical 'Geometry' became hidden in the drive ... almost.
While both systems were in use, a track came to mean 63 sectors, so partition 1 started at sector 63, with the MBR at sector 0 and unallocated space in between.
Lots of things have used this over the years. Grub still does on a BIOS install with a MSDOS partition table.

The MBR allows 446B for the boot loader, which is not nearly enough. Grub cheats. These 446B load some more blocks that were written to the unallocated space when grub was installed. Even that's not enough but its enough for grub to read the rest of itself from a filesystem.

With a GPT disk label, it gets more complex. The partition table starts in sector 1, so the unallocated space is gone. BIOS can't read that partition table, so GPT writes a fake, protective partition table in the MBR too. Its no more than a warning to users and a flag to tools that GPT is in use.
The start of the first partition is now 1MB, as that's at the end of the GPT partition table.

With grub on a GPT labelled drive, it needs somewhere to put the code that would have gone into the unallocated space on a MSDOS drive. That's the 2Mb partition.
Its not yours, you don't mount it or make filesystems there.

Booting a GPT drive can get quite messy. You need to be aware that the BIOS will not read the partition table that the tools show you by default.
If you need to see the fake protective partition table, you need to ask for it. Setting the bootable flag is the only thing that should be changed here.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Maybe one key piece of information we would want:

@pun_guin,

Did you reformat this disk after you installed Void? Or is it the same partitions overwritten?

We already know your BIOS is not EFI-aware, but what we don't know is if it's GPT-aware. GPT was created a long time ago but not universally adopted.

That said, the system IS booting so I'm 99% sure the system can understand a GPT partition table.

@Naib,

The info the OP posted showed a pure GPT partition table, not a combination. There is no bootable flag.

Also, those of us who are using UEFI boot can stop showing our partitions. The only useful print at this point, besides what pun_guin might post, would be a similar BIOS-only system (EFI not supported) booting correctly from a GPT disk. It seems like a dozen of us (me included) have shown essentially the same partition layout which is irrelevant because we're booting EFI.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Actually, once I said it I realized I have a system like this:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 3:44 pm Post subject:

1clue,

Show the dos partition table too please.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 4:58 pm Post subject:

1clue,

pun_guin · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 204

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 7:46 pm Post subject:

pun_guin,

Please post

pun_guin · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 204

Sure - sorry, I'm later than expected:

pun_guin · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 204

Shot into the blue:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 8:33 pm Post subject:

pun_guin,

Bummer. That's the correct setting in the msdos partition table.

You don't have an EFI-System. The partition tool is looking up the partition type word in a look up table and telling what it means.
The very few partition types are actually used.

If you did have an EFI-System the UEFI firmware would expect to read that partition to find something to boot and it would have to be VFAT.
You have BIOS, it doesn't care about the EFI-System partition.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Tony0945 · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 11:52 pm Post subject:

pun_guin,
What's your mobo make model number and revision?
Also the BIOS version?

pun_guin · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 204

Where can I see the mainboard data?

According to the BIOS setup (InsydeH2O Setup Utility), this is "v1.02" of the BIOS software, the second-to-latest one available from the website. The BIOS update software requires Windows, so the update to v1.04 (which does not seem to fix anything boot-related) could be hairy, at least. According to user forums on the web, a FreeDOS USB thumbdrive could work here, but I don't know if this is not the entirely wrong place to search.

After all, Void could easily do it.

_________________
I already use the new Genthree.

pun_guin · Apprentice Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 204

Oh my $holyEntity.

It's fixed! :idea:

Fascinatingly, neither the missing "bootable" flag nor my decision to use Legacy Boot (ok, probably my decision to use Legacy Boot, but why now?) was the culprit.
The BIOS has a separate preference for Network Boot (on a different page...) which could override my boot order without a warning. And I - let me emphasize that - had not changed that preference between my Void installation and my Gentoo installation, because why would I?

Guess what happened when I switched that flag.

I owe everyone of you, especially NeddySeagoon, an apology for wasting three days of your time because I was so focused on that boot order thing. Sorry - please roll your eyes in an adequate manner. Insert an imaginary "whip" emoticon here. Gah!

head -> wall. head -> wall.

On the positive side of things:

I learned a lot - willingly or unwillingly , about partitioning, GPTs, MBRs and my total lack of knowledge on some IT-related topics. I am seriously disappointed by myself now.
The Gentoo community has officially reached #1 in my internal (read: made in my head) ranking of helpful IT communities. You deserve all respect I can give you.
Just to close the circle to my opening post from which I admit to have drifted off a lot by now: Looks like you won't get rid of me for another while. Yay! (But I'll better open a new topic for the next time I fail to use something.)

A good start, I guess.
_________________
I already use the new Genthree.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

\o/ Congratulations!

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of why installing Gentoo might take longer, and why it ought to take less time the next go around, or at least be a little easier.
_________________
Quis separabit? Quo animo?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:59 am Post subject:

pun_guin,

We have all learned something from this thread, thanks to you sharing the fix, so its not wasted time.

Naib · Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 1:29 pm Post subject:

The key is you persevered. Sure the boot flag and the gpt were red herrings but both of these concepts exists to mitigate BIOS inconsistencies (some need it, some dont...). Void may have been a red-herring as well in as far as booting an install liveCD may have been enough for your BIOS to decide PXE has a higher priority.

I was going to suggest a "reset to default" on your BIOS before you came back that all appears good
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Morality124 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Feb 2018 Posts: 102

I've read through this thread, and I am encouraged to approach Gentoo again (ironically was heading towards FreeBSD, but then the lack of Spectre/Meltdown mitigation, plus the recent CoC introduced, has soured that desire). However, one core issue remains for me.

I have no problem approaching something difficult and having to learn things - that's my career. What I have a massive issue with is the feeling that no matter how closely I follow the directions, I am being sabotaged behind the scenes by the actions of nefarious individuals. While I get the impression that the majority of Gentoo documentation is written in a non-political, good faith way, I am aware that core pieces reflect political choices of certain developers, regarding OpenRC. Having followed the relevant threads on this forums for years at this point, it seems that a "by-the-book" installation with the recommended packages would be broken by design - meaning I have to go through and redo it, while running against the current of the of said-developers' political pushes.

One reason to leave Windows and other similar OSes is because the excessive diligence in regards to updates. This is needed because Microsoft pushes packages that often impede the machine (I think this is common knowledge) for nefarious reasons. The problem with Gentoo to now is that I now have to contend with a similar situation regarding some developers. I don't mean monitoring the news for potential update troubles - I mean arbitrary changes to standards. This is on top of the fact that great diligence is needed as more and more packages become "systemd-centric" (which to be fair, is wider Linux issue and one of the reasons I was considering FreeBSD).

Are my concerns overblown? Thanks.

EDIT: I should add that the amount of time I can devote to my future OS choices is limited, which makes the feeling of dealing with active sabotage that more apparent.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2018 8:28 pm Post subject:

Morality124,