siepo
February 10th, 2013, 03:45 PM
I had an uefi boot problem which has been mysteriously been solved by boot-repair, but I would love to understand what was the problem and what particular action solved it.
I did not make detailed notes, and am as a consequence a bit fuzzy about the details. So, since the problem is solved, I am merely asking whether any of the following rings a bell and whether anyone has any illuminating guesses without spending a lot of time on it.
Was it the addition of EFI/Microsoft? Was it nvram/efivars settings? Did a newer BIOS have anything to do with it? How come both pastebin pages mention a grub legacy?
Now about the problem.
I have a Zotac Zbox ID81. I had originally trouble installing Ubuntu 12.10 in uefi mode, i.e. I had trouble creating a live stick which would boot in uefi mode and offer the option of creating an EFI partition. In the end I succeeded, although I only got a grub prompt rather than a grub menu from the live stick.
This was three months ago. But recently I had to RMA the zbox. Since it was a barebone without an hd, I kept the hd and inserted it in the replacement machine when it arrived. I had expected that would be the end of it.
However, the zbox did not recognize the hd as an uefi boot device in the boot menu of the bios, and I could not boot my live ubuntu stick either. I might get a screen with just the word 'GRUB' and next time the hd would not be present in the bios boot menu at all. However, I could boot a FreeDOS boot stick.
It seems like bios setup, instead of just having a fresh look at the hardware, also remembers previous experiences and draws the wrong conclusions.
Somehow, after running boot repair with recommended repairs twice I finally got a grub prompt (not quite sure about the presence of a grub menu) and could get back into my system. I reinstalled grub-efi-amd64 and ran update-grub and now everything is fine.
The pastebin pages are paste.ubuntu.com/1625025/ (http://paste.ubuntu.com/1625025/) and paste.ubuntu.com/1625689/ (http://paste.ubuntu.com/1625689/) There are some spurious differences because the first one was done with a regular ubuntu live stick, with boot-repair installed on the fly, and the second with a ubuntu secure remix live stick with built-in boot-repair.
Also, sda3 is the ubuntu installation I actually use, sda2 is for backup/experimenting purposes and is not regularly updated. I deactivated os-prober because it does not seem to understand this setup and would add nonsense entries.
I did not make detailed notes, and am as a consequence a bit fuzzy about the details. So, since the problem is solved, I am merely asking whether any of the following rings a bell and whether anyone has any illuminating guesses without spending a lot of time on it.
Was it the addition of EFI/Microsoft? Was it nvram/efivars settings? Did a newer BIOS have anything to do with it? How come both pastebin pages mention a grub legacy?
Now about the problem.
I have a Zotac Zbox ID81. I had originally trouble installing Ubuntu 12.10 in uefi mode, i.e. I had trouble creating a live stick which would boot in uefi mode and offer the option of creating an EFI partition. In the end I succeeded, although I only got a grub prompt rather than a grub menu from the live stick.
This was three months ago. But recently I had to RMA the zbox. Since it was a barebone without an hd, I kept the hd and inserted it in the replacement machine when it arrived. I had expected that would be the end of it.
However, the zbox did not recognize the hd as an uefi boot device in the boot menu of the bios, and I could not boot my live ubuntu stick either. I might get a screen with just the word 'GRUB' and next time the hd would not be present in the bios boot menu at all. However, I could boot a FreeDOS boot stick.
It seems like bios setup, instead of just having a fresh look at the hardware, also remembers previous experiences and draws the wrong conclusions.
Somehow, after running boot repair with recommended repairs twice I finally got a grub prompt (not quite sure about the presence of a grub menu) and could get back into my system. I reinstalled grub-efi-amd64 and ran update-grub and now everything is fine.
The pastebin pages are paste.ubuntu.com/1625025/ (http://paste.ubuntu.com/1625025/) and paste.ubuntu.com/1625689/ (http://paste.ubuntu.com/1625689/) There are some spurious differences because the first one was done with a regular ubuntu live stick, with boot-repair installed on the fly, and the second with a ubuntu secure remix live stick with built-in boot-repair.
Also, sda3 is the ubuntu installation I actually use, sda2 is for backup/experimenting purposes and is not regularly updated. I deactivated os-prober because it does not seem to understand this setup and would add nonsense entries.