[arch-general] Single Drive Fresh Install (mbr/grub2) Fails to boot (can boot existing from .iso??)

[Uwe Hametner]

If you ever get your historic EFI to work while „that it's buggy as
hell“ {Patrick Burroughs (Celti), 29 Oct 2016} -- then where is the
point for doing a magic jump over to bios_grub if ever feasible in a
reasonable manner?

Though I lack some knowledge, where the wiki tells: at last 260 MiB are
required (ESP) on 4-KB-per-sector drives. W10 (sorry for adding this)
just takes 100 MiB on eMMC Flash Memory Drives, which also is the size
I chose for my latest linux install on a SSD.


General remark: Comments w/o errors are invalid.


Am Donnerstag, den 03.11.2016, 02:45 -0500 schrieb David C. Rankin:
> On 10/30/2016 1:34 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:
> > 
> >   So I guess that leaves me with Ralfs solution of find the "Clear
> > the CMOS"
> > jumper, clear the bios, replace the battery (I hope it is a
> > standard 2032 or its
> > a trip to the battery store...)
> I think I have it figured out by process of elimination. I took
> another
> drive and formatted it GPT and created a 1M bios_boot partition as
> shown
> on the arch grub wiki. After grub install and reboot, exact same
> issue
> "hard disk error 0F3" no operating system found. So with 2 new drives
> in
> the laptop, neither would boot.
> 
> sda as the GPT/bios_boot configured drive, and sdb as the MBR
> configured
> drive, no boot, but booting the install .iso from USB and "Boot
> Existing
> OS" worked fine on both (with changes to either 'hd1 0' and 'hd2 0',
> respectively.
> 
> So with further reading, it looks like this bios/laptop will actually
> require a full UEFI partition scheme that the bios converts/boots in
> Legacy mode via a bios_boot partition on the drive. That is a screwy
> way
> of doing things, but makes sense given that the .iso has a full EFI
> setup and boots with no problem whatsoever.
> 
> Question, for those familiar with UEFI schemes, since the .iso boots
> fine, is there anything else I need to do other than following the
> Arch
> grub wiki to construct the UEFI partition scheme and create the 1M
> bios_boot partition? The wiki says the bios_boot partition can be
> anywhere (partition number wise) as long as it lives in the first 2T
> of
> space. Any other thoughts or tweaks to the UEFI setup I ought to try
> for
> the next test?
> 
>