grub + gpt (and arch, oh my)

[Todd Cole]

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.


On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 3:16 PM, Michael Butash <mike at butash.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Except my system refuses to boot off it.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/installation_guide
>
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#BIOS_systems
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> I'm open to some suggestions here wtf I'm doing wrong from arch, and
> general power users that have attempted using gpt.
>
> -mb
>
>
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-- 
Todd Cole
Ubuntu Arizona Team
4605 S PRIEST DR LOT 3
TEMPE AZ  85282-6507
toddc at azloco.com
602-677-9402
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