Siduction Forum
Siduction Forum => Installation - Support => Topic started by: GoinEasy9 on 2014/01/29, 03:55:35
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Ever since installing siduction on my main computer, which has a UEFI motherboard, I wanted to write up a How-To to share what I learned. Hopefully, I be able to add some of the instructions to the appropriate parts of the manual. So, if anyone sees a way I can expand this little tutorial, or make it simpler, please make a post. I hope to add screenshots and some examples of efibootmgr on my next day off.
How to install "siduction" to a computer with UEFI firmware.
CREATING THE UEFI ENABLED USB STICK (Some of this was found in the manual, link below.)
The first thing you need, after downloading the iso, is a usb stick 2GB or larger, formatted with fat32 or fat16. Most of the usb sticks you buy these days are already formatted fat32. If it's a new stick, you're ready to go. If you've used it before this, just make sure that the partition is marked bootable an doesn't have any weird flags attached to it. You can check this by using "parted" and then the print option in a root terminal. (Don't forget to quit parted.)
The reason I mentioned the flags, was because, the first time I tried using the method below, I was using an empty "used" 4GB stick, and, although I had the boot flag on, it failed. After doing a quick format on it, I noticed that the only flag left was the boot flag, and, after that, the second attempt succeeded. Just an observation to pass along.
Now, extract the iso (I just use dolphin, right click on the iso file, and, click "Extract" and use the Autodetect sub-folder option). Then copy the "contents" of the extracted sub-folder to the usb stick. There should be a total of 5 folders and 2 files to copy over.
Now unmount the usb stick using kwikdisk or by using "umount" in a root terminal. Using "df -h" in a terminal, you can find out where the usb stick is mounted. Mine looks like this:
/dev/sdc1 3.8G 1.2G 2.7G 30% /media/Patriot
I would use "umount /media/Patriot" to unmount the stick. You would replace "Patriot" with whatever your usb stick is mounted as.
After unmounting the stick, use "df -h" again, to make sure the media is indeed unmounted.
Then, from a root terminal, first do:
# syslinux -i -d /boot/isolinux /dev/sdXN (i=install, -d=directory)
# Where "X" and "N" correspond to your usb device. As you can see above, my stick was at /dev/sdc1.
At this point, you are ready to use your UEFI bootable usb stick.
If you like, you can read the "siduction-manual" explanation of the commands here:
http://manual.siduction.org/hd-install-opts#usb-hd (Go to the bottom of the page.)
BOOTING THE USB STICK
Next, we move on to booting live siduction from the usb stick, and, what additional changes are needed when installing in UEFI.
UEFI based computers don't need an adjustment in bios as to boot order. Well, you can adjust the default boot, but, you can also just choose what to boot without setting it as default. If you hit the specific key to your motherboard while booting (Mine is "Del" on an ASUS mobo), you will probably see 2 choices for booting the usb stick (amongst other devices). Choose the line for the usb stick that is preceded by UEFI, and, the boot should proceed normally, until the siduction desktop appears.
If you would like to check if you have booted into UEFI mode, open a root terminal, then type "efibootmgr -v" (also without quotes), then enter. If you successfully booted into UEFI mode, you will see a listing of devices/OS's. If you didn't, you'll see an error message that looks like this:
Fatal: Couldn't open either sysfs or procfs directories for accessing EFI variables.
Try 'modprobe efivars' as root.
MOUNTING THE ROOT PARTITION
After exiting the screen where you used gparted to create/edit partitions, the sidu-installer allows you to select the mount for the chosen root partition on a separate screen, so, when reaching the mounting screen, there's no need to add it to mounts. The next screen in the sidu-installer allows additional mount points.
MOUNTING THE ESP (/boot/efi) AND HOME (/home)
Here you want to mount the ESP and /home partitions (if you choose to make a separate /home partition). The dropdown menu contains a choice for /home, so as long as you choose /home and match it to the correct partition on the left, and, then hit "ADD", your /home will be mounted at boot.
Since there is no choice for /boot/efi in the dropdown menu, click the button below the mountpoint window and manually enter /boot/efi. Now, make sure it's matched to the partition where the ESP resides, (You jotted that down earlier, right? If not, you can always go back and look.), and, don't forget to click "Add".
On new disks or for fresh installs that use the whole disk, that partition should be sda1. If you're adding siduction to a UEFI machine that already contains other OS's, it's probably sda1 also. Then again, the ESP doesn't need to be on the first disk partition. For example, if you converted an old mbr install to UEFI, you could place the ESP anywhere on the disk (restricted possibly by being on a primary partition).
So, once /boot/efi is mounted correctly, the install precedes normally, placing all of the UEFI components in their correct locations, and, adds a choice for siduction in the motherboards NVRAM. It takes over the first spot, so on a reboot it will be default. If you wish, you can change that using the motherboards UEFI bios menu screen, or, by using efibootmgr.
There you have it. You now have siduction running on UEFI. Have fun.
To be continued.........
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Nice writeup -- thank you for doing that. One of these days I'll be building a new system and this will be helpful, as I have never built on a UEFI motherboard.
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http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Installing-Linux-The-Good-Bad-and-Ugly-79883.html
greetz
devil
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Thank you.
i haven't thought about UEFI at all, since I don't haven't bought any new computer yet. But we all need to adopt to this, one way or the other!
So big thank you!
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Thank you, that made my day!
One hint for non-English speaking siducers:
as the bootmenu of the stick doesn't look like what you expect, one can't change the language by pressing "F2". But by pressing "e" you can add for example "lang=de" as cheatcode for the kernel and then boot with "F10".
BTW: I was not able to set the boot-flag on my stick. Parted said something like "Error: The flag 'boot' is not available for loop disk labels.". But it worked for me.
greez,
Roland
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@vindeliker When I used parted to set the boot flag, my commands were:
(In parted, of course)
select /dev/sdc1
set flag on
Not that you did it differently, but, just putting down what I did.
USB sticks are funny. It could have already been marked for boot, or maybe boot wasn't being read by parted. Anyway, the point is moot. It worked for you. Glad to hear that.
BTW - Thanks for the hint about the language cheatcode. For some reason, if I didn't set the language with F2, I'd have trouble with Iceweasel and the language that was set for spellcheck. Maybe setting lang=en will help.
I was going to add this to the first post, but, I seem to have lost the ability to edit it.
And, for those of you who would like further reading, one of the Red Hat/Fedora guys, Adam Williamson, conjured this up recently:
https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how-does-that-actually-work-then/
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In another posting, you mention that /boot/efi must be in fat32 mormat. I don't think that you stated that explicitly here.
You wrote that /boot/efi must be at least 200 Mbyte. Is there any advantage to making it larger?
And thank you.
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I'm glad you mentioned that. In the howto, I pointed to FAT32/FAT16 with the usb stick, but not when creating the partition on the hard disk. Hopefully, folks will read the whole thread and see this, since I can't edit the original post.
BTW - It doesn't matter if the ESP is FAT32 or FAT16. I started using UEFI back in 2012, and, at that point only Ubuntu and Fedora were able to install in UEFI mode, and, it was Ubuntu that gave me a FAT16 partition, that still works, and, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't.
BTW2- My ESP partition is 200MB, created by the initial Ubuntu install. When I had to create another ESP, I gave it 1GB, which most would say is overkill. It's just that, at the time, I was using Fedora, and, their use of a 200MB /boot partition, eventually became too small, and, when I updated to a new version, I had to repartition, in order to get enough room in /boot. With HD's now in the terabyte size, I'm not concerned about overkill. I really don't think there's an advantage in making it larger, probably not. In fact, I have 5 distros with bootloaders in /boot/efi, and it's only consuming 10MB.
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Hi,
Ok so I had to replace my motherboard on my laptop, I have the hard drive, untouched which was installed in 'UEFI mode'.
I put the drive back in and of course Siduction doesn't boot. I have 4 partitions, partition 1, is a fat 32 partition that contains efi/siduction/grubx64.efi, partition 2 is ext3 partition is /boot, partition 3 is a btrfs partition with / on it and partition 4 is a btrfs partition with /home on it.
I booted off a siduction USB key, and tried to add Siduction back to the EFIboot manager with the following command
efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda/ -p 1 -l /efi/siduction/grubx64.efi -L Siduction
It adds the entry but it wont boot siduction.
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When executing
efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda/ -p 1 -l /efi/siduction/grubx64.efi -L Siduction
My notes show quotes around '/efi/siduction/grubx64.efi'
Could that be the problem? I use bash, and, can't explain why, but, they are necessary.
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Ok I figured it out!! :)
So I booted into my siduction install on my laptop.
efibootmgr -c -w -l \\efi\\siduction\\grubx64.efi -L "Siduction" -p 2 -d /dev/sda
I don't know if you need the -w switch but I got the instructions from below and modified accordingly.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/383166/having-trouble-adding-uefi-entry-using-efibootmgr (http://askubuntu.com/questions/383166/having-trouble-adding-uefi-entry-using-efibootmgr)
I was under the impression that efibootmgr was supposed to convert '/' into '\' but it doesn't at least the version I may have on my usb key.
-edit- thank you GoinEasy9 for you help anyway. I did try it with the quotes before changing the / to \\ and it didn't work.
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Interesting, but then again, I have seen the double \\ before. Anyway, I'm glad you figured it out.
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I have set up two different usb sticks as described above. When I boot my asus p550c laptop in uefi mode using either usb stick I get a repeated loop of the following streaming down the screen.
"
error failure reading sector 0x0 from 'hd2'.
error failure reading sector 0x0 from 'hd2'.
error no such device: /boot/grub/x86_64-efi/2014-11-23-03-42-53-00.
"
Any suggestions as to where the problem lies?
Thanks.
bad_
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I discovered there was a way to boot my siduction live cd in uefi mode on my ASUS P550CA laptop.. The key was to avoid using the BIOS setup(which doesn't show the uefi version of the cd/dvd drive) and use the boot options screen which does show the live cd as uefi bootable. On this Laptop the boot options come up by pushing "ESC" repeatedly immediately after power on.
After that I followed GoinEasy9's instructions and I now have a successful installation.
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Very interesting and tanks to all, who contributed. Can anybody tell, what the advantages of UEFI are and whether one can really benefit from?
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Can anybody tell, what the advantages of UEFI are and whether one can really benefit from?
UEFI is the replacement for legacy BIOS firmware. For any new computer that you buy, you will have a UEFI firmware, instead of the BIOS that you have been accustomed to. So it really isn't a question of "benefits" -- we simply must adapt to this new piece of technology that has been adopted by the industry.
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But any UEFI Firmware has ha legacy or csm mode, and for Linux there is no benefit for using UEFI.
Specials, which UEFI is able to give for the user are only helpfull for installed Windows systems.
So there is no need to use UEFI for linux systems. Even for Windows or dualboot systems UEFI is not nessesary to use. Only Secureboot depends on UEFI.
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Hi guys,
thank you both for your informations. Now I know what to do on this, this is to say nothing. Good for me!
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I purchased a new Dell desktop with Windows 8.1 Pro, UEFI. I wanted to dual boot Windows and siduction. I followed the guide above but the USB stick I prepared does not boot. The error lines (there are only 2 different lines repeating over and over) scroll by very fast, but they appear to read
error: failure reading sector 0x0 from 'hd1'
error: no such device (then a longer line that I haven't read in full, ends with the 11-23-2014 date of the siduction Indian Summer .iso)
I am able to install siduction with UEFI turned off but then Windows won't boot.
Any ideas? TIA -- Mike
I did turn off Secure Boot and I turned off Fast Boot in the Windows Power Options.
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OK -- I now have UEFI and dual boot with windows working. I was able to fix my legacy (MBR) install of siduction with boot-repair. I prepared a usb stick of boot-repair and it booted correctly in UEFI mode and repaired my siduction install (it set up a chroot and uninstalled grub and installed grub-efi and did some other magic and I now have a grub menu that allows me to select either windows or siduction and everything works as it should
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This didn't work for me. First, there were 6 folders, not 5, for the IndianSummer release. Perhaps the [BOOT] folder should not be copied? Second, when I opt to use the UEFI boot option for the USB drive, the following error continuously scrolls on my screen:
error: no such device: /boot/grub/x86_64-efi/2014-11-23-04-45-08-00
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KrunchTime: the next release will support UEFI - until then, it will be hard - best chance is to install siduction in compatibility mode - after that one could use a UEFI-capable Live-System like Kanotix, chroot into siduction an install the needed parts (grub for UEFI) - done. Or one could wait for a few weeks, i'm working on UEFI right now
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What melmarker has described to fix a legacy install of siduction is what the boot-repair usb stick (I made this usb just by extracting the files from the .iso of boot-repair and copying them to a usb stick) automated for me. The chroot and other commands i needed were set up for me, no problem.
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This didn't work for me. First, there were 6 folders, not 5, for the IndianSummer release. Perhaps the [BOOT] folder should not be copied? Second, when I opt to use the UEFI boot option for the USB drive, the following error continuously scrolls on my screen:
error: no such device: /boot/grub/x86_64-efi/2014-11-23-04-45-08-00
I had the same problem KrunchTime, you can work around it, by copying the same file from the x86-efi folder to x86_64-efi folder. Its an issue with the ISO image.
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@melmarker: Thank you for the additional info.
@mdmarmer: Thank you for your response, but I don't want to hose my current setup and then use boot-repair to fix it. There's always a chance that boot-repair might not work or something unforeseen could happen. UEFI is the standard now...it's time to learn and use it. BIOS isn't coming back.
@terroreek: Thank you for your suggestion. I'll give it a shot.
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No worries, it should work, it did for me. After that its just follow the guide that GoinEasy9 outlines. If you plan on using btrfs subvolumes, /boot can't be in a subvolume, I don't know if UEFI or the EFI stub understand or comprehend what a subvolume is. So as an example this is how my T440's drive is split up.
sda1 -> /boot/efi 100Mb/fat32
sda2 -> /boot/ 1Gb/ext4
sda3-> @ > / 100Gb/btrfs
sda4-> @home > /home 260GB/btrfs
sda5 -> /home/terroreek/VMs 100Gb/ext4
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Okay, I'm making progress; terroreek's tip helped. I am now able to use the UEFI option in the UEFI boot menu and I am able to boot into fluxbox. Before I commence to attempt an install, is there a way to change the keyboard layout to Dvorak? I didn't see a Dvorak option under the keyboard options in the Grub boot menu and I've tried adding the following to the boot line without success: kbd=dvorak.
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We simply ignored neo layouts for a few years - the man page will help. Btw, if anyone interested - we could add this, we accept patches, that should be (relative) easy.
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@melmarker: I was able to change the keyboard layout to Dvorak booting IndianSummer in BIOS mode. I forget which function key enables you to do that.
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F2
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This didn't work for me. First, there were 6 folders, not 5, for the IndianSummer release. Perhaps the [BOOT] folder should not be copied? Second, when I opt to use the UEFI boot option for the USB drive, the following error continuously scrolls on my screen:
error: no such device: /boot/grub/x86_64-efi/2014-11-23-04-45-08-00
I had the same problem KrunchTime, you can work around it, by copying the same file from the x86-efi folder to x86_64-efi folder. Its an issue with the ISO image.
For the benefit of other users, when you extract the contents of an IndianSummer ISO, there is a file called 2014-11-23-04-45-08-00 in folder /boot/grub/i386-efi. You need to copy that file over to /boot/grub/x86_64-efi before copying the files to a USB thumb drive.
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Update:
in this thread there is discussion about creating an UEFI boot stick by copying extracted folders of ISO image to the Fat32 partition of a stick. THIS DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE !
I lost a lot of time, then agaida helped me on irc: The ISO image has to be written directly to the device, like shown there: https://manual.siduction.org/hd-ins-opts-oos (https://manual.siduction.org/hd-ins-opts-oos)
An UEFI system will then boot from the stick.
best, gnasch
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Thanks for the update. I still haven't tried installing the new version onto my UEFI machine yet.