<div dir="ltr">I have not tried with arch but there both grub2 and efigrub efi and uefi needs its own fat partition to keep os keys in and secure boot usually must be off but I have had several that would only work with secure boot on. as best I can tell bios are implemented is different ways by each company that make uefi bios try one then the other but so far we have installed quite a few at the installfests and not much of a issue anymore.<br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 3:16 PM, Michael Butash <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mike@butash.net" target="_blank">mike@butash.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">So taking to heart that perhaps I have simply outgrown ubuntu and its ilk, I decide to explore arch again. So far, it's been painful.<br>
<br>
In "the good old days" of everything being 512byte sectors, circular geometry, and new-fangled ssd with this ^2 thing, I adapted my installs to align things with fdisk, but most things indicated to "just use gpt" that "does it automagically". Ok, except I can't seem to make it work, years ago last time I tried, or apparently now.<br>
<br>
Using gdisk, I adhered to arch docs to create a small 1mb partition first that grub can install itself into after mbr and before the actual grub disk. I thus ended up with 3 partitions, sdx1 for the bios slice, sdx2 for a 1g /boot slice with ext3, and the rest into sdx3 I make for luks+lvm pv for root and everything else. I build this using gpt, build all partitions, mount them in /mnt, and pacstrap everything successfully. I make the initrd, install grub to the disk, all goes flawlessly showing no errors.<br>
<br>
Except my system refuses to boot off it.<br>
<br>
Bios boot order specified that disk as first, and with my neon install, it did. I ssd secure-erased with hdparm, and rebuilt with the prior layout, and this just refuses to work with grub, and what I presume is gpt complication.<br>
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Info on using gpt and NOT EFI for bios-based legacy boot systems seems really scarce... am I just doing something wrong here? Really just following these guides for arch here, the install seems ok itself, mostly just can't figure out why grub is being odd. This was step one with an old disk and using to experiment some before I have my actual usage drives, ideally a mdraid set of two of these that is waiting on shipping atm.<br>
<br>
<a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/installation_guide" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind<wbr>ex.php/installation_guide</a><br>
<br>
<a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#BIOS_systems" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind<wbr>ex.php/GRUB#BIOS_systems</a><br>
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I did find some ambiguity about *which* grub to use, trying both "pacman -S grub" or using grub-bios packages, neither made the mobo even think about booting off it.<br>
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I did find some other notes in using fdisk still after gdisk makes them to set them bootable, which I did as well - still nada.<br>
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I'm open to some suggestions here wtf I'm doing wrong from arch, and general power users that have attempted using gpt.<br>
<br>
-mb<br>
<br>
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