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

[Patrick Burroughs (Celti)]

On Sat, 29 Oct 2016 05:48:29 -0500
"David C. Rankin" <drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/29/2016 01:18 AM, Uwe via arch-general wrote:
> > Hi
> > 
> > Just to clarify: do you really boot from BIOS via MBR or do you use
> > UEFI (and are therefore in need of GPT)?

> 100% MBR/BIOS BOOT no UEFI used by either the Win10 OS disk I took
> out, or the new Arch disk I put it. I checked in windows with:
> 
>   bcdedit /emum

The laptop model you gave *does* use UEFI, but is early enough in HP's
endeavours to implement it that it's buggy as hell. I suggest you fire
up `msinfo32` in Windows and look for the “BIOS Mode” entry to confirm
you're in ‘Legacy’ mode and not UEFI mode.

> Another curious part of the drive/boot problem, is the HP "drive
> test" which happily scans over the drive holding Arch, but will just
> never assign it a number. For thoroughness, I tried configuring drive
> access as IDE from AHCI -- no help.

That is likely a matter of partitioning and filesystems; the HP drive
test is a UEFI application and if you partitioned your drive as MBR and
filled it with filesystems it doesn't recognise, it might ignore it. I
can't confirm that, though; it's been far too long since I've ran Linux
on an HP laptop of that era.

> As yet another test, I reinstalled the 128G windows drive, it
> continues to boot fine. Any other thoughts?

I suggest you double-check the partitioning and possible presence of
an EFI system partition on that Windows drive from within your Arch
install. If both msinfo and the partitioning confirm it's not UEFI,
then I suggest you a) make sure the firmware is up-to-date, and b)
comb through the firmware settings and make sure that it's fully in
Legacy/BIOS mode and not Hybrid UEFI/BIOS mode; the latter is the
cause of most such problems, in my experience.

~Celti
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