UEFI - Can't get a boot menu at all
 

I am really annoyed by this EFI stuff ... missing plain old school bios and grub2 right now!

I have a new desktop with Windows 8 on it. I want to keep my windows - so have partitioned and installed Arch. Now, my issue is to get the bootmanager to see it to boot.

My pertinent partitions are:
/dev/sda2 EFI partition - this is the one Windows came with/on - I did NOT create it as I want to keep the ability to boot Windows 8
/dev/sda3 Windows 8
/dev/sda4 Windows 8 stuff
/dev/sda6 Arch / - formatted as ext4 and fully installed

I am using EFI USB to boot/install. I can chroot and did a full arch 64 install.

I have tried grub efi version, rEFInd, and EFIstub with no luck. When I remove the USB and boot it goes straight into windows. The more I learn, the more I like the rEFInd setup.

I followed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UE … ing_rEFInd with no luck.

Also of note I have tried mounting /dev/sda2 to both /boot and /boot/EFI and neither worked for me.

efibootmgr shows me Windows, my USB, rEFInd, and my harddrive all as possible boot options, but again with a restart it goes straight into Windows 8

Any ideas? This is all so frustrating.

Your best bet might be to post to the Arch forum, if you haven't already. I've noticed very little Arch-related activity on LQ. This post might be helpful:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162809

Thank you

Might be worth using a virtual machine until arch has more support?

I had a similar issue when I installed Linux on my new ASUS laptop.

Of course, my laptop is in my office right now, so I can't check what I did- but essentially what you need to do is change the settings in UEFI BEFORE you install Arch (in your case wipe your Arch partition and reinstall). By doing so, you trick UEFI into thinking "oh okay, Linux is a legit operating system," not that it isn't.

I'll take a look in UEFI when I get to the office tomorrow and post back here.

I took a look at my laptop. In UEFI I disabled UEFI Secure Boot and I enabled Launch PXE OpROM. Give that a try- this may be specific to an Asus laptop, so you may have to tinker some.

I think that
PXE OpROM is for network boot.
http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/definition/PXE

You need to change the order to make rEFInd the first boot manager it looks for.

The way I did this on my laptop was to enter "setup" by pressing Escape when the Asus logo appears, and then going into the 'boot' tab and changing the boot order.

You only need to do this once, then it will always look for rEFInd first.

Also, as mentioned above, you need to disable "secure boot". That option should appear in setup somewhere, but I cannot confirm this since I refuse to buy any Win8 certified hardware.
I've been using it for the past few months, and it has been great.