How worried should I be about my hard drive?

anticapitalista · 10-26-2023, 11:02 AM

@hazel - if you decide to install antiX on UEFI, make sure you do this first.

Quote:

Known issues.

IMPORTANT IF INSTALLING GRUB TO UEFI/ESP

Before installing
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade
This will update the gui and cli installers and bring in missing efivar and efibootmgr

Alternatively,
sudo apt update && sudo apt install efivar efibootmgr

https://antixlinux.com/antix-23-released/

hazel · 10-26-2023, 11:13 AM

Thank you, that's worth knowing. I already checked for efibootmgr and found it was absent. But what I would like to know is if the installer will register my new ESP with the UEFI chip when it installs grub there. Because I think that's the nub of the problem.

mrmazda · 10-26-2023, 12:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

If I install AntiX with GRUB included, passing the correct ESP partition to the installer, will that fix the problem?

First thing to do if you haven't already is to eradicate the old UEFI boot entry, either within BIOS setup, or using efibootmgr (my preference). With os-prober enabled in AntiX, you should be able to boot every installation present that has a validly configured directory on the ESP. Whether this assumption holds true for elilo rather than grub, I can't more than guess, so won't. Neither do I use os-prober. I've never used elilo, and I boot from custom.cfg with entirely scratch mcedit composed stanzas, rather from grub directly.

mrmazda · 10-26-2023, 01:53 PM

Given what you've already done, you may need only efibootmgr to solve this. These are two specific commands previously used here (two different computers, two different times, neither using secure boot):

Code:

efibootmgr -c -L "opensusetw" -d /dev/nvme0n1 -l '\EFI\opensusetw\grubx64.efi'
efibootmgr -c -L "opensuse153" -l '\EFI\opensusetw\grubx64.efi'

In the first, more than one internal storage device was present, in the second, not. You don't need to be running the installed system to do this, any efibootmgr should suffice. The -L strings are directly correlated to the computed value of /etc/default/grub/s GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= string, which is also equal to the applicable directory name in /boot/efi/EFI/. Where elilo sources the directory name I don't know, but shouldn't matter. It's the directory name on the ESP you need. It's just that you can control the applicable directory name via GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=, since in multiboot environments, additional installations of same name distros will overwrite those already existing - not a troublemaker one wants or needs.

This is an example of removing an existing entry.

hazel · 10-27-2023, 12:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrmazda

Given what you've already done, you may need only efibootmgr to solve this. These are two specific commands previously used here (two different computers, two different times, neither using secure boot):

Code:

efibootmgr -c -L "opensusetw" -d /dev/nvme0n1 -l '\EFI\opensusetw\grubx64.efi'
efibootmgr -c -L "opensuse153" -l '\EFI\opensusetw\grubx64.efi'

Thanks. I think the equivalent on my machine would be

Code:

efibootmgr -c -p 2 -L "Elilo" -l '\EFI\Slackware\elilo.efi'

I shall need to specify the partition number as well since, according to the man page, it defaults to 1.

hazel · 10-27-2023, 08:48 AM

So I used efibootmgr to create a new UEFI menu entry for elilo and rebooted. It doesn't quite work properly yet. The UEFI keeps defaulting to the old entry even though I used the internal interface to raise the new entry above it. But I was able to reach it via the F12 alternatives menu and boot it. Maybe if I delete the old entry, it will boot the new one then.

I am posting this out of graphical links in LFS, which is a great step forward.