New install multiple times, UEFI/EFI system, only boots from USB bootstick

KrazyKanuk · 10-01-2023, 09:54 PM

I have a newer MSI MAG Tomahawk motherboard with 2 M2 drives (One Samsung, One Western Digital. Both 2TB) with DDR4 32GB Ram, external video is ASUS GeForce RTX 3060 8GB, older CD/DVD ROM.

I have installed Slackware64-current from an iso I burnt to disk with windows back in June. The DVD boots into UEFI mode with no issues, I get to partitioning my disks also with no issues. I partition the disks as follows:

Quote:

/dev/nvme0n1p1 500MB EFI
/dev/nvme0n1p2 10GB Swap
/dev/nvme0n1p3 1.8TB Linux File System

/dev/nvme1n1p1 1.9TB Linux File System (Whole Disk for /home, don't format only mount it)

After partitioning the disks I run setup and it finds the swap disk and creates it and adds to /etc/fstab. It finds the Linux File System on both disks first one gets formated and mounted as / and added to /etc/fstab second drive it finds it and mounts it to /home and adds to /etc/fstab. It then finds the EFI drive and says it is going to format it and add it to /etc/fstab (I don't believe this happens for there are things on it from previous installs after the install is done). It continues on the install and at the end says it is going to make a USB boot disk which it does and then asks to install ELILO on the EFI partition at /boot/efi. When setup finishes and it ejects the DVD and I reboot it goes into the bios of the motherboard. I exit this put the USB boot stick in and reboot and it boots fine other then I have to be there and press enter for it to continue.

Is there a way I can fix this so it boots from the hard drive. Above where I mention I don't think it formats the EFI drive is because when ELILO didnt boot the system from the hard drive I tried to install both grub and and refind both which didn't work but still on the /boot/efi/EFI. If i run efibootmgr it looks like this:

Quote:

krazy@krazy:~$ sudo efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0004
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0003,0004,0001,0000,0002
Boot0000 slackware-15.0+ HD(1,GPT,4f7bca20-d33f-4f75-a1f6-50073424308d,0x800,0xfa000)/File(\EFI\slackware-15.0+\grubx64.efi)
Boot0001 UEFI OS HD(1,GPT,4f7bca20-d33f-4f75-a1f6-50073424308d,0x800,0xfa000)/File(\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI)..BO
Boot0002 rEFInd Boot Manager HD(1,GPT,4f7bca20-d33f-4f75-a1f6-50073424308d,0x800,0xfa000)/File(\EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi)
Boot0003* Slackware HD(1,GPT,4f7bca20-d33f-4f75-a1f6-50073424308d,0x800,0xfa000)/File(\EFI\Slackware\elilo.efi)
Boot0004* UEFI: KingstonDataTraveler 2.0PMAP, Partition 1 PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/USB(12,0)/USB(2,0)/HD(1,MBR,0x5a34f23a,0x800,0x8000)..BO
krazy@krazy:~$

The last entry is the USB boot stick and is one that works. The elilo.
On the stick the directory and files look like this (one that woorks)

Quote:

krazy@krazy:~/stick$ ls EFI/BOOT
BOOTX64.EFI* elilo.conf* message.txt*
krazy@krazy:~/stick$

elilo.conf

krazy@krazy:~/stick$ cat EFI/BOOT/elilo.conf
chooser=simple
message=message.txt
delay=300
timeout=300
#
image=/vmlinuz
label=huge.s
read-only
append="root=/dev/nvme0n1p3 vga=normal ro"
krazy@krazy:~/stick$

The files directories on the EFI partition

Quote:

krazy@krazy:~/stick$ ls /boot/efi/EFI
BOOT/ EFI/ Slackware/ grub/ refind/ slackware-15.0+/ tools/
krazy@krazy:~/stick$

krazy@krazy:~/stick$ ls /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware
elilo.conf* elilo.efi* initrd.gz* vmlinuz*
krazy@krazy:~/stick

krazy@krazy:~/stick$ cat /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf
chooser=simple
delay=1
timeout=1
#
image=vmlinuz
label=vmlinuz
initrd=initrd.gz
read-only
append="root=/dev/nvme0n1p3 vga=normal ro"
krazy@krazy:~/stick$

Any help getting this to boot from hard drive would be greatly appreciated, even if I have to re-install and do something different during install.

jailbait · 10-01-2023, 11:09 PM

Are you running any software that depends on UEFI? If not then I suggest that you turn off UEFI in the BIOS. Then you could probably run the install treating the EFI area on the hard drive as ordinary drive space.

colorpurple21859 · 10-01-2023, 11:22 PM

Copy the following around the internal drive efi parition: EFI/Slackware/elilo.efi to EFI/BOOT/Bootx64.efi, copy the rest of the contents of EFI/Slackware/ to EFI/Boot/

KrazyKanuk · 10-02-2023, 04:01 PM

I tried copying contents of EFI/Slackware to EFI/BOOT and rebooted, this didn't work. I went into my BIOS and changed UEFI to CSM in advanced. Changed UEFI to Legacy+UEFI in boot and changed boot devices to USB Key,CD/DVD ROM,Hard Disk. Removed the USB boot stick, booted with DVD in and re-installed removed all the partitions on the first hard drive and used fdisk /dev/nvme0n1 (instead of cfdisk /dev/nvme0n1, read lilo has problem with cfdisk) finished the install rebooted and when it came up I was presented with the LILO menu (used advanced instead of simple) and booted fine without boot stick. I don't use software that requires this, and the drives I have which are brand new are not over 2TB if I upgrade the drives to over 2TB i will need to switch I just can't see it for the upgrade I just did was to prevent me from over paying for parts which I had to order on line and take long periods of time to arrive for it was a motherboard with the LGA1151 which was from the 2017 era.

urka58 · 10-08-2023, 11:42 AM

How is the 500 MB partition formatted (EFI)? It must be FAT (theoretically it could be either 16 or 32, but I'd go with FAT 32) and flagged ESP and BOOT. The install procedure does not automatically format the EFI partition, so I suspect yours is not properly formatted.
I'd try to preliminarily format with a bootable disk such as Parted Live or System rescue CD the EFI partition and then you install Slackware as per instructions. Having a properly EFI formatted partition the install should find it and put automatically the ELILO and register the entry with efibootmgr. This is what I do for new installations. The mkfs.vfat after disk partitioning never worked for me...

Hope this helps
Ciao