On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 6:44 AM, David Benfell <benfell@parts-unknown.org>wrote:
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Hi all,
So far, my attempt to install Arch Linux on a UEFI system is a total facepalm moment. The problem is in booting post-install.
So, first, does anyone have actual--and successful--experience installing Arch on a UEFI system? Yes, I went to the Arch Wiki, which initially pointed me at GummiBoot. There are actually two sets of instructions, one given where I looked first, for the UEFI entry, and another under the entry for GummiBoot. Neither succeeds, but I wound up following the latter set of instructions (and cleaning up extra entries with efibootmgr, which fortunately makes this relatively easy).
GummiBoot says it can't find /vmlinuz-linux. I tried modifying the configuration to say /boot/vmlinuz-linux, but no joy. Apparently, I'm really supposed to copy this file and the initrd image to the EFI partition, but nobody says where in the EFI partition, so I have no idea.
I also tried following the instructions for grub-efi. I'm just mystified. I managed to install the right package, but from there I just wasn't understanding a thing. I've been using linux since 1999 so this shouldn't be so completely mystifying.
I tried installing rEFInd (from sourceforge). As near as I can tell, it does indeed detect all the possible boot options on the system. But when I try booting the Arch installation, it says it can't find the root partition. It also detects the GummiBoot option, but that leads the same place as before. Finally, it detects the Windows option, which I hope still works (unfortunately I do need this).
I guess getting something that just works--like it did with BIOS systems--is not in the cards. What do I do now?
Thanks!
I have a system that I installed a couple of weeks ago using rEFInd -
which works really beautifully and needs no manual intervention when new kernels arrive. However it did take me some time with a lot of help from Rod Smith to get it all set up correctly. Basic steps were: 1) Format disks with GPT instead of MSDOS 2) Make sure that there is a /boot/efi/EFI ESP which is formatted FAT32 3) Since I also wanted /boot to contain initial ramdisk and kernel I had /boot as a directory in my root (/) partition which is ext4. 4) In order to get it to work I made sure that the rEFInd config files were set up in the ESP as well as the required files in /boot (and including the ext4 rEFInd driver files in the ESP so that rEFInd can read the initrd and kernel files unde ext4 in /boot (and include the rEFInd driver files in those directories also. 5) In my system I found that the standard method to write the nvram entries failed to work - so I had to boot to the efi shell from the arch install iso on usbkey and write the nvram entries from the shell. If you want more details I can post more tomorrow. I hope this helps. -- mike c