kpatz
May 28th, 2015, 08:14 PM
Last winter I built a new firewall box using an Intel Atom D2500CCE mini ITX motherboard. When I installed Ubuntu Server 14.04.1 (later updated to 14.04.2), I enabled UEFI boot in the BIOS settings, and installed the OS to boot using grub-efi. This worked great, through several updates, up until this morning. I woke up early so I figured I'd check for updates (haven't done so in a month or so) and there were a bunch, so I installed them. Well, Murphy's Law struck, and I made a mistake doing this on a morning before having to go to work. The machine wouldn't boot afterward, and since it's my firewall/router, it's my most critical box.
So, I grabbed a spare monitor and keyboard and plugged them in, and found the machine was displaying a message along the lines of "no boot device found, hit any key to reboot". I grabbed a Lubuntu USB stick I made and booted off of that, and tried reinstalling grub using the steps I used when I originally built the system (I had built it in a VM originally and then cloned it to the hardware). Basically, I mounted the SSD partitions to /mnt (including the EFI partition to /mnt/boot/efi), mount --bind the /dev, /dev/pts, /sys, /proc and /run to the corresponding directories on /mnt, chroot to /mnt and run as root:
apt-get install --reinstall grub-efi
update-grub
grub-install /dev/sda
I did these steps and it still wouldn't boot. Now maybe I botched a step as I was rushing, but I wanted to get the machine back up and running before I had to leave for work. As a last-ditch attempt, I turned off UEFI in the BIOS (reverting to legacy boot), changed the EFI partition to a BIOS partition, commented out the /boot/efi line in /etc/fstab, uninstalled grub-efi and installed grub-pc, ran update-grub and grub-install /dev/sda, rebooted, and voila! It boots now.
Anyway, has anyone else had UEFI booting break with the recent grub update? Can I get UEFI boot working again? When I have some more spare time and can afford the downtime, I may make another attempt to make UEFI work again. It worked great until now. I'm just wondering if there's an issue with the updated grub and UEFI.
So, I grabbed a spare monitor and keyboard and plugged them in, and found the machine was displaying a message along the lines of "no boot device found, hit any key to reboot". I grabbed a Lubuntu USB stick I made and booted off of that, and tried reinstalling grub using the steps I used when I originally built the system (I had built it in a VM originally and then cloned it to the hardware). Basically, I mounted the SSD partitions to /mnt (including the EFI partition to /mnt/boot/efi), mount --bind the /dev, /dev/pts, /sys, /proc and /run to the corresponding directories on /mnt, chroot to /mnt and run as root:
apt-get install --reinstall grub-efi
update-grub
grub-install /dev/sda
I did these steps and it still wouldn't boot. Now maybe I botched a step as I was rushing, but I wanted to get the machine back up and running before I had to leave for work. As a last-ditch attempt, I turned off UEFI in the BIOS (reverting to legacy boot), changed the EFI partition to a BIOS partition, commented out the /boot/efi line in /etc/fstab, uninstalled grub-efi and installed grub-pc, ran update-grub and grub-install /dev/sda, rebooted, and voila! It boots now.
Anyway, has anyone else had UEFI booting break with the recent grub update? Can I get UEFI boot working again? When I have some more spare time and can afford the downtime, I may make another attempt to make UEFI work again. It worked great until now. I'm just wondering if there's an issue with the updated grub and UEFI.