[Discuss] UEFI boot vs BIOS & Grub
John Blomfield
jabfield at shaw.ca
Mon Oct 6 15:47:56 PDT 2014
The saga continues!
My Intel Nuc Box d54250wykh mini computer started to misbehave
occasionally by restarting by itself after being shutdown from the
Desktop or the command line (shutdown now). Searching the forums
revealed I was not alone but with no solutions except one that suggested
a BIOS upgrade. I checked the BIOS upgrade release notes and found that
release 0026 fixed the problem but also that 0025 had fixed the EFI
problem. My BIOS was release 0021 and the latest is release 0030.
If you have not installed Windows the only way to flash the BIOS is to
create a DOS bootable USB drive, copy the bios files to it, boot and
flash from there. I have not messed with DOS for at least 30 years so
that became a bit of a re-learning challenge. Also the only Windows
program I have to create this was Vista on my VirtualBox. After many
expletives directed at the founders of Microsoft and false starts, I
have now an updated BIOS to release 0030.
Intel's lack of support for Linux has not helped much.
I have not attempted to re-install my OpenSuse 13.1 using EFI Bios
options since everything is fine and a lot of work has gone into the
present customization. However, when OpenSuse 13.2 comes out in a few
weeks (months?) time I will have another go then and see if the EFI bug
has really been fixed.
On the bright side with everything working smoothly my Nuc Box
d54250xykh is a great piece of gear. I would not recommend that anyone
that is hardware or software challenged, buy it. Its definitely for
those that enjoy customizing there computers, RAM, SSD, HD, Wifi, OS
installation etc.
John
On 10/03/2014 02:53 PM, John Blomfield wrote:
> Well I can report that after many, many hours of trying this and that,
> many combinations of different approaches, I failed miserably!
>
> One issue was that the "BIOS" in EFI mode would not recognize an empty
> SSD even when partitioned as GPT. If it was partitioned with MBR it
> did show up in the MBR mode of BIOS. Having both EFI and MBR modes
> enabled I was able to install openSuse 13.1 with the GRUB2-EFI
> bootloader and then the BIOS/EFI mode did recognize it but would not
> boot it. That was the best result I was able to achieve.
>
> However, I finally gave up on using EFI and partitioned the SSD as MBR
> and installed openSuse 13.1 with GRUB which I prefer to GRUB2. From
> the Linux user's point of view, I guess, it does not really matter how
> you boot your system as long as it works and you can maintain it
> easily. However, from a purely academic point of view I would like to
> know what if anything I was doing wrong or if there was some
> incompatibility between my box's firmware and openSuse 13.1. Most of
> the tips and discussion on the forums refer to people dual booting
> Linux on a machine which had Windows 8 pre-installed. I found nothing
> much by someone starting from a blank SSD or HD.
>
> Judging from the lack of discussion on this topic on "Discuss" I
> assume nobody has any experience of a clean (no pre-installed Windows)
> install using EFI?
>
> John
>
>
> On 10/02/2014 02:49 PM, brendan wrote:
>> hope it goes smoother for you than it did for me! i spent a few days
>> cursing UEFI until i got things to work (the ubuntu installer is
>> better about it now, and resizing my windows partition so linux would
>> be on the same physical disk helped greatly too - i probably wouldn't
>> have had any problems had i just used a single disk from the get go).
>>
>> On 14-10-02 02:30 PM, John Blomfield wrote:
>>> Thanks for the info. I am wading through this very comprehensive
>>> document http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>> On 10/02/2014 12:51 PM, brendan wrote:
>>>> my computer came with windows8 installed with EFI enabled - it
>>>> requires EFI boot else it won't work (and of course, i can't just
>>>> reinstall it without it since i don't have actual install discs).
>>>>
>>>> i've ended up with grub2 installed and booting as the default
>>>> bootloader. there are entries for windows in grub that just point
>>>> to the EFI file for windows, the entry looks like:
>>>>
>>>> ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
>>>> menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager (on /dev/sda1)' --class windows
>>>> --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-efi-32FB-61B6' {
>>>> insmod part_gpt
>>>> insmod fat
>>>> set root='hd0,gpt1'
>>>> if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
>>>> search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root
>>>> --hint-bios=hd0,gpt1 --hint-efi=hd0,gpt1
>>>> --hint-baremetal=ahci0,gpt1 32FB-61B6
>>>> else
>>>> search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 32FB-61B6
>>>> fi
>>>> chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
>>>> }
>>>> set timeout_style=menu
>>>> if [ "${timeout}" = 0 ]; then
>>>> set timeout=10
>>>> fi
>>>> ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
>>>>
>>>> the ubuntu installer managed to autoconfigure them all correctly
>>>> (it helps *greatly* if windows and linux are on the same physical
>>>> hard drive - i used to have linux on a second drive and i had a
>>>> horrible time of it).
>>>>
>>>> linux may already be mounting your EFI partition for you at /boot/efi.
>>>>
>>>> windows has two efi files: bootmgfw.egi (the fancy boot loader
>>>> option you are currently seeing) and bootx64.efi (which just boots
>>>> into windows) - you can choose to have one or both in your grub.cfg
>>>> file.
>>>>
>>>> alternately, you can keep the windows boot manager loading and do
>>>> some junk to make it have grub/lilo as an option inside it. it
>>>> didn't really work so well when i tried it, however.
>>>>
>>>> trying to do this stuff manually is really unpleasant. if you can,
>>>> just let a linux installer that is EFI aware handle it (if you boot
>>>> the install medium via EFI boot, it should detect it's in EFI mode
>>>> when it starts)
>>>>
>>>> On 14-10-02 12:29 PM, John Blomfield wrote:
>>>>> About 2 years ago I installed OpenSuse on a new Windows 8 Laptop,
>>>>> for my wife, that had EFI without much bother I just turned off
>>>>> the "secure boot" and proceeded. My wife's computing needs are
>>>>> simple so I used a fairly simple partition layout, "/" and "/home"
>>>>> plus a dual boot with Windows 8. By default the bootloader for
>>>>> OpenSuse is GRUB2. Basically, the EFI stuff was ignored and
>>>>> although I don't like GRUB2 and prefer legacy GRUB because its
>>>>> some much simpler to edit the boot menu and recover from MBR being
>>>>> overwritten, I just left GRUB2.
>>>>>
>>>>> However, is seems things are changing! My new bare bones computer,
>>>>> although it was bought without Windows installed, is Windows ready
>>>>> with a very fancy GUI setup for booting either in EFI / GPT mode
>>>>> or "legacy" BIOS / MBR. This all points to BIOS / MBR being
>>>>> deprecated over time. I could of course opt for the BIOS mode and
>>>>> use GRUB as I always have but feel the necessity to "get up to
>>>>> date" as my grandkids are always telling me.
>>>>>
>>>>> So here is where I need help and suggestions. I have piles of
>>>>> documents to read on EFI boot loading but would like to know what
>>>>> the list is doing about all this. I read that GRUB / GRUB2 does
>>>>> not work well with EFI and the pure EFI bootloader does not work
>>>>> well with Linux. Alternatives such as ELILO, EFI stub loader and
>>>>> Gummiboot. Any suggestions as to where to go in all this?
>>>>>
>>>>> John
>>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
--
John Blomfield
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Old John B's Linux Notes http://www.oldjohnbslinux.wordpress.com
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