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... |
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|
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Right. After spending most of the last 10 days and some nights wrestling with |
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the beast, I've got it fixed at last. |
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|
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The Gentoo Handbook says to create a small unformatted partition at the |
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beginning of the (primary?) disk, then to create a FAT-32 partition for /boot, |
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then whatever other partitions are required. |
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|
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Neil said above that he doesn't do that; he omits the unformatted partition, |
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and I believe that's quite popular. I tried following the same scheme, but |
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that's what caused the difficulties I started this thread with: on this system |
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I need both those partitions. The system will not boot without both of them. |
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[1] |
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|
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The screen-shot of gparted I posted above shows the current layout once again. |
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|
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The handbook's description of partition creation on a UEFI system says to set |
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the bios_grub flag on partition 1 and the boot flag on partition 2. I tried |
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setting them both on the combined partition I was trying to get working, but |
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the second one to be set cleared the first one, or else it just hid it from |
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display. Either way, no boot. |
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|
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I found several other apparently authoritative pages detailing other /boot |
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directory structures and file names; guessing which of them might work in any |
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given case is not straightforward. Googling for "Gentoo EFI" or similar |
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returns a list of them. |
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|
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For the record, this motherboard is an Asus X99-A, with UEFI BIOS 2.16.1242. |
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|
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It's interesting that, whenever the system failed to boot (and that often |
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happened without showing me the boot selection menu) apparently the BIOS |
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started the kernel stored in its data area, but it didn't find /boot/loader/ |
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with its config files, so it didn't know where to look for the real kernel |
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image. |
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|
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I still don't know what started this whole adventure (to coin a phrase); my |
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DVI KVM switch came under suspicion at one stage, so I'll keep a wary eye on |
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it. |
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|
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One remaining question: does it matter what kernel image is stored in UEFI |
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data? I'm tempted to think not: it just has to get the initial boot step |
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started. After that, /sbin/init "pivots" (whatever that means) to the real |
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kernel under /boot. |
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|
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1. I remember, dimly, that while commissioning this machine from new, I had |
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trouble installing and running grub:2. I knew even less about UEFI systems |
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then, so if I were to try it again now I might find a way. But I hate the damn |
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thing, so as long as I don't need it it's not getting near my machines. |
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|
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-- |
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Regards, |
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Peter. |