Install siduction onto a UEFI motherboard / laptop

[GoinEasy9]

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.........

[dibl]

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.

[devil]

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Installing-Linux-The-Good-Bad-and-Ugly-79883.html


greetz
devil

[Lanzi]

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!

[vindeliker]

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

[GoinEasy9]

@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/

[jjjrrr3]

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.

[GoinEasy9]

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.

[terroreek]

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

Code: [Select]

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda/ -p 1 -l /efi/siduction/grubx64.efi -L Siduction
It adds the entry but it wont boot siduction.

[GoinEasy9]

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.

[terroreek]

Ok I figured it out!!  

So I booted into my siduction install on my laptop. 

Code: [Select]

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

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.

[GoinEasy9]

Interesting, but then again, I have seen the double \\ before.  Anyway, I'm glad you figured it out.

[bad_aptitude]

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_

 

[bad_aptitude]

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.

[mylo]

Very interesting and tanks to all, who contributed. Can anybody tell, what the advantages of UEFI are and whether one can really benefit from?