UEFI Boot Problems

[oldfred]

Yes it sounds like you are rebooting so any changes to the grub menu are not kept. For permantent changes you have to edit /etc/default/grub and run sudo update grub. You have to do that after you have booted or chrooted into your install. You may be able to make changes to grub.cfg which it says not to edit, but I am not sure if those changes will help or not.

And it sounds like you are booting, but having other issues. I am surprised it worked before as even Phronix review site has several reviews of i5 & i7 where he discusses versions of kernels or other software required to make it work.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...i5_2400s&num=1

[linthusiast]

Wuhoo after making the following changes, I have been rebooting and cold booting every time with success for the last dozen or so boot tests.

While toying around with my last install it got to the stage where I was dropped to BusyBox during boot and I started switching between tty's. I noticed on one of them I got some boot messages where it said was not able to get access to /dev/sda2 (my root partition). I looked up the problem and found that some people had success by modifying their grub.cfg and putting the following at the end of the line that loads the kernel

quiet splash vt.handoff=7 rootdelay=90 reboot=a,w

The rootdelay instruction is what made the biggest difference. The reboot=a,w stopped my machine from hanging during reboot and shutdown.

So there you have it, I'm confident the rootdelay parameter is what made the difference, if not it was one of the following:

Fresh natty x64 install (manually created partitions during install, with EFI boot partion, root partition & swap partition, and specified to install loader to EFI partition) also with "download updates" selected during installation via a wired network interface. When install was complete, and I managed to get in to the OS, I updated the grub.cfg with the above. I also installed any updates that were available (I literally updated everything it suggested I update). I downloaded/installed the nvidia-current driver as this failed during the install and 173 was installed instead.

Thank you very much oldfred for your assistance & patience. I genuinely appreciate your contributions. Cheers buddy

[Basher101]

wow this will save me alooot of time and frustration, because next month i will get a build with UEFI too (MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) with i7 2600k and the GTX 570 graphics card and a SSD for windows and ubuntu).

*bookmarked*

[oldfred]

Glad it worked, not that I really suggested anything that did.

But I will also bookmark this for others that may have similar issues.

[linthusiast]

wow this will save me alooot of time and frustration, because next month i will get a build with UEFI too (MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) with i7 2600k and the GTX 570 graphics card and a SSD for windows and ubuntu).

*bookmarked*

Hey Basher101, Natty (11.04) managed UEFI fine. However when installing, make sure you manually create the partitions yourself. Create a 200MB EFI partition and from the drop down list for the partition type, select "EFI boot partition". Then create whatever other partitions you need along with your swap partition. Make sure you write the boot loader to the EFI partition (again via another drop down to select the partition). What I've noticed after my several attempts is that if you do the above, the installer will not install grub-pc, but instead install the correct grub-efi, etc. So as far as Ubuntu is concerned it knows you are using UEFI and not MBR right off the bat.

The issues I was having seemed to have more to do with root partition access during the boot sequence, but I was lacking the visibility in to the boot sequence and thanks to oldfred I found my way past that problem.

When I last posted I still have just a single SSD connected up to my Asus P8P67 (SATA 6GB). In the mean time I tried to connect up two other SATA disks to the 3GB SATA interfaces on the board. When I tried to boot, I again got the purple screen of death. I popped open the case, disconnected the 2 extra drives and the machine boots again. I'm guessing I'll have to look in to that, but I'd say my solution is within the UEFI settings as opposed to Ubuntu. My board has the B3 revision which fixed SATA issues in earlier type 1155 Intel boards this year, so it shouldn't be a firmware issue.

It's great though having my machine back working again. My Asus board, i5 2500k, nvidia-current drivers, and my broadcom (b43) wireless card all running perfectly, even 5.1 audio

Now I can get back to real work instead of crawling around on a 5 year old laptop.

[csete]

linthusiast: I attempted to do an install very similar to yours. However, I keep landing on the GRUB rescue screen. I can't seem to get my Ubuntu install to boot at all. My thread is still open at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1857605 . I tried to do what I believe you suggested in terms of the partitioning in the installer, but ended up at grub rescue prompt. My dmesg output shows that I have American Megatrends as well, so it seems like I should have a similar setup. Once difference is that I'm trying to allow for a Win 7 dual-boot in my partitioning.

Anyway, can you tell me what you did step-by-step to get to a working UEFI boot? I'd really appreciate it as I feel like I'm about to lose my mind trying to get this working.

Thanks so much,
Craig

[alphaamanitin]

ARG!!! I AM SO JEALOUS OF ALL OF YOU!!! GRUB2 will not install on my machine. I am trying to dual boot two SSDs, one with Windows 7 UEFI and one with Ubuntu UEFI. Windows 7 install in UEFI mode fine, but I cannot get Ubuntu to install (though I admittedly have not tried since about two months after 11 was released). I cannot even make it past the install. It always crashes and burns while trying to install grub2. This happens whether or not I set up the boot partitions manually. I think when go home I will read through this thread and give it another shot. Otherwise I am abandoning Ubuntu for Archlinux (puke, don't want to take the time to set up everything!) or some other distro.

AlphaA

[linthusiast]

Hey guys sorry I didn't spot this until now.

OK my mobo is an Asus P8P67 (rev 3.1, with B3 revision). I started up the machine from an Ubuntu (Natty, 11.04, x64) USB drive. My UEFI boot manager allowed me to start up the USB key in either UEFI or normal mode. I read elsewhere that you should start it up in UEFI mode if you want to do the install properly. I would get to the black Grub screen, which let me Try or Install. I selected "Try". It usually took about 3 tries to get the machine to start up in UEFI mode via USB, with kernel panics during the first few tries. I literally kept trying the same USB UEFI boot using whatever methods my motherboard allowed until it worked. Starting up in non UEFI mode is a waste of time.

So anyway, let's say you are now at the Ubuntu Live desktop. If you have a wired net connection available, make sure it's connected and eth0 is up and running. Do a quick browser check to make sure you're online. Run the installer (via desktop icon) and have it get any updates available during the install. One difference between my setup and what I think you want is that I didn't want to install Windows. I have a single SSD (& a few normal SATAs for storage). I wanted to just install Ubuntu on the SSD. So when the installer asked me what I wanted to do, I simply told it to Erase the entire SSD and install (from the 4 options available). I did this because I had already failed Ubuntu attempts previously installed and needed to wipe the disk anyway. So I cleared the partition table that currently existed and created a new one.

So for my 64GB SSD (/dev/sda) I did the following:
First partition at the front of the disk: 200MB, select EFI boot partition from drop down. 200MB should be plenty even if you plan on installing more than Ubuntu for the other .efi files.
Second partition: 55GB ex4 (journaled), which is my '/' (root) partition.
Third partition: the remaining ~8GB for swap

If you plan on installing Windows, leave yourself sufficient free space unlike what I did for the relevant NTFS partition(s).

Install, and keep an eye on the installer messages. Something I noticed months ago when I was first installing Natty was that the installer kept crapping out due to the ISO being compromised, so double check the MD5 checksum for the ISO you download. If I did that a few months back, I wouldn't have stupidly lost a few hours wondering WTF was wrong

On a compromised ISO I never got to Install Success, so if you do, that's obviously a good sign . Also before the installer ends, keep an eye out for the grub installation messages. You should clearly see grub-efi as opposed to grub-pc get installed.

OK, so that's the installation. Reboot. Bring up UEFI and make sure that you now have a new UEFI:"ubuntu" boot option available. Run it. You should get to the GRUB screen. Try and boot the first option. If the machine doesn't boot, try it a few different ways until you successfully start up UEFI:ubuntu. I eventually did get the machine to boot this way. Once it started up I installed all updates that were available and downloaded my nvidia-current drivers because the 173 driver wasn't nearly as good. If you never succeed in SSD booting, try and start up using the Live USB again. Whatever way you get to a desktop, (mount your root partition if coming in via USB) change /boot/grub/grub.cfg to include the

rootdelay=90

parameter towards the end of the line that attempts to load your kernel. Save it, and reboot the machine. When Grub comes up again when trying to boot your Ubuntu install on your SSD, press 'e' and just confirm that your grub.cfg change is now available in the config. Press F10 to continue with the boot.

At this stage my machine started to boot properly and has continued with success every time since.

A few tests that you can do to help diagnose problems with UEFI. You want the following:

sudo efibootmgr -v

Should give you a listing of boot options available.

sudo fdisk -l

Should complain that you are using GPT partitioning.

Synaptic package manager should not make reference to grub-pc being already installed. If it does, get rid of it. Make sure that grub-efi-dummy, grub-efi-(the 64bit version I assume you want) & efibootmgr.

Finally and I didn't do this myself, but I've heard that you should never try to install Windows first and then Ubuntu later in EFI mode as it will only wipe your EFI partition or at least render Windows unbootable. This is quite a change from all the years we have been installing Linux last and having Grub detect on the existing operating systems. I have not installed Windows in a long time, so however the kids are doing it these days see if there is any scope for you to write the Windows bootloader to your existing EFI partition. Remember the Ubuntu installer formatted the EFI partition as FAT so Windows will be able to work with it. However it is FAT16, and I'm not sure if this will cause problems. If it does, then perhaps manually create the partitions when installing Ubuntu, and create a FAT32 partition, but you will need to use efibootmgr or gparted later to set the boot flag or something. Not 100% on that, as I haven't done it yet, but I do know that setting it as a "EFI boot partition" causes the installer to format as FAT16 without ability to override.

To be honest I'm not a PC gamer (anymore), so when I need other OS's, I just virtualize in Ubuntu.

I hope this is of help to you & best of luck

[oldfred]

Each of these has only one person posting the error, but which I regularly see the same errors in the forums. If you have any of these issues please login to Launchpad and add your name to those with the issue. They fix those issues that are more common.

Deletes Windows efi partition
Installer should not format an existing EFI System Partition
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...fi/+bug/769669
EFI SYSTEM PARTITION should be atleast 100 MiB size and formatted as FAT32, not FAT16
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...fi/+bug/811485
ctrl-x does not work in grub-efi
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b2/+bug/722950
grub-update fails to detect windows bootloader on a uefi system
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b2/+bug/807801

[alphaamanitin]

I tried launchpad, and I consider myself moderatly tech savvy, and couldn't figure it out. The shame, I know. I wish those were my problems, but I will add my own as well. Thanks for the info oldfred.

AlphaA