[arch-general] USB flash installation medium in BIOS machines

[u34 at net9.ga]

Juergen Werner via arch-general <arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:

> On 03/11/2020 10.23, u34 at net9.ga wrote:> Have you entered the firmware
> configuration, or the bios configuration,
> > whatever that is, to see its options?
> 
> I have 2 options for that during POST. Press F2 or Del to go into BIOS
> configuration and see and reorder the boot devices. This list is a
> classical BIOS boot device list. The other option is press F12 and

Don't F2, or Del show more complex screens, other than just reorder boot devices?


> select a boot device, without the need to permanently reorder stuff.
> This is very plain and leaves not much room for interpretation and I
> tried both.
> 
> Since there is no (known) option to force the boot mode of the flash
> drive, I went with ??scars suggestion and created a BIOS-GRUB flash drive
> to load the ISO as loop device, which went really smooth. I used that
> method before, when I originally installed Arch on it, but just for the
> reason that I could have multiple ISOs on a stick without reflashing all
> the time. That is probably the reason, why I never ran into this problem
> with the Arch ISO.
> 

Perhaps the problem is that itthe dirmware is looking for an ESP, which
can not be found?

> I came to the conclusion, that my hardware is faulty. Somehow it is
> capable to start the systemd-boot loader but not the actual UEFI image.
> And all while not mentioning any EFI capabilities in BIOS settings.

Well, if it boots systemd-boot, have you tried to configure systemd-boot?
Are you aware to the fact that there used to be 32 bits variant of the efi firmware?

> 
> Just out of curiosit, does anyone know a way to "ask" the hardware about
> EFI capabilities, without actually booting through EFI?

I think that if you can start the installation, you might query hardware capabilities.
I am referring to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Checking_the_firmware_bitness .

--
u34