Hi. I'm always happy to meet the nice guys in the forum. Thank you.

Recently, I got a brand new computer from my lab (by the way I'm a graduate student, with CS department.) Intel i7 cpu, 64GB ram, 512 GB SSD, NVIDIA 1080Ti. What's the matter is 512 GB SSD with NVME 1.2. As you might guessed, I plugged a Slackware installation USB, but, alas, slackware 64 14.2 installation image could not handle the NVME disk. Both UEFI and legacy mode.

I also tried usbboot.img from the slackware64-current, but any how I couldn't boot my machine from Slackware.

I saw a few post about booting from NVME SSD, but somehow, I could not follow them. They were not worked for my situation.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...sd-4175586404/

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post5538267

The machine was shipped initially with ubuntu distribution, so I also tried it, and it just boots. The installer takes all the matter about the NVME things.

However, I definitely want to install the Slackware, and use it.

So, to make this long story short:

is there a way to install a slackware distribution to a NVME SSD?

Thank you,

Sungjin.

Hello,

Yes, see here:
http://slint.fr/forSlackware/NVMe/

2 members found this post helpful.

There's a lot of different ways to do it. Eric covers one method on his blog. You can also use the installer for -current and install 14.2 (but if you want to use UEFI, you'll either need to install -current or patch eliloconfig so it can properly detect the NVMe drive).

My steps to do this would probably be like the following:

1. boot off 64bit -current install disc (written to a usb)
2. partition nvme drive
3. start setup
4. go through normal steps until it asks where the source is... I selected a local mirror of 14.2 packages since I wanted stable (but you could use a second usb drive with 14.2 on it or try a net install)
5. let the installer do its thing
6. once it is installed, but before you go through the rest of the setup wizard, use Ctrl+Alt+F2 to go to a new terminal. From there, I grabbed the patched copy of eliloconfig and replaced the one on newer install (/mnt/usr/sbin/eliloconfig)
7. From there, you can go back to the installer and continue the rest of the wizard.

If you don't want to use UEFI (and would rather use legacy BIOS mode), you can skip the eliloconfig steps and just continue the wizard after the installation is done.

IIRC lilo is unable to install a boot sector on a NVMe drive, because it doesn't know this kind of device's naming scheme, so you'd need to use a recent grub.

Thank you. I'll try that.

Good catch. I didn't try legacy booting at all with my NVMe drive. I wonder if it'd be possible with using UUIDs instead of device names? But then UEFI was far easier than I expected (other than tweaking the installation process, but that's already solved in -current), so I don't think I'll be going back to legacy/BIOS booting.

Sorry to bother you, but one of the things which I could not understand is "the patched copy of eliloconfig". Could you please tell me where can I get the patch?

I'm trying to boot from -current usb image, and sadly I'm wasting my time.

Thank you for your help.

Regards,
Sungjin

I'm very reluctant to say this, but, that procedure you suggested did not work for me. I'm sorry for that.

So, I began to worry maybe there's a problem in the bios chip-set or the mother board, because the boot loader entry for the EFI won't go any how into the bios.

I have spent 13 continuous hours with this problem, and the time is running out. I don't care about this, but my boss will. He will kill me if he see me. So I think this is beyond my knowledge, and I have to wait another polished installer.

Thank you for all your kindness.

Regards,
sungjin

sungjin, a month ago I installed slackware-current onto a nvme ssd-drive with uefi. This worked fine with Didiers changed eliloconfig as is now present in current (did you see this thread https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...516/page2.html? Most answers given above bear on this).

From your posts it is not completely clear what you did do; only that it did not work; without any description of what you tried it will be hard to give any other pointers. Still I wouldn't give up.


What I did followed basically the sequence Bassmadrigal describes in post #2 (but with some differences of course):

1) For starting the installer I used a usb basically made with the usb-installer you can find in the "usb-and-pxe-installers" folder in the Slackware-(current) tree. The tree with the slackware64 folder with the packages to be installed were on an an external drive (I only had a small thumb drive).

2) As the machine came with a windows os I had to get into the 'bios' to turn off secure-boot and set the boot-order so that the plugged-in usb-stick would be used first and not the default windows.

When the stick works (if not; sometimes changing a USB port can help; also, in my experience not all usb-sticks made this way worked) and the computer boots you're half-way ;-)

3) The nvme-ssd is found under /dev/nvme0 (might not be a surprise but I was looking first for some /dev/sdx and did not find one (no other harddrive installed at that point yet) and feared the nvme drive was not recognised ;-)

4) As one needs a gpt formatted drive for uefi booting I used gdisk to format the nvme-ssd (A samsung btw), which was very straightforward and gave no alignment hassle.

5) I mounted (as /mnt/hd) an external hard drive for the packages to install (was a bit tricky to get setup to actually find the folder with the packages; you need a full path (no symlinks))

6) no lilo but elilo and make sure to get a mkinitrd made and copied to the EFI before rebooting.

7) maybe best to stick with current if you have very new hardware; and if that might need a more recent kernel you could check out https://gitlab.com/idlemoor/dusk/tree/master & https://dusk.idlemoor.tk/ )

Maybe you've done this all, but maybe you omitted something which made it not work at your end.

HTH

1 members found this post helpful.

[duplicated post removed]

Sorry for the confusion. You'd just need the latest copy of the script from -current. You can grab it at any mirror under source/a/elilo/eliloconfig (like this one from the SBo mirror). You could also run explodepkg from your -current installation media on the elilo package, which will extract all the contents of the package into your current directory, then you can just copy /directory/extracted/to/usr/sbin/eliloconfig to /mnt/usr/sbin/eliloconfig

Another option, depending on how many thumbdrives you have kicking around (I probably have a dozen), you could download the copy of eliloconfig (mentioned in the paragraph above) to a new thumbdrive and then copy it onto the system once installation is done.

I never tried using the usb image for -current, rather I would dd the whole ISO to a thumbdrive. I'm not sure if this can cause issues.

OK, somehow I managed it. Now I can boot from NVME. Thank you for all of your kind answer.

However, what I actually did is somewhat weird solution. I'll post the detail in a moment.

I don't know exactly why but it seemed that the efibootmgr was not properly register a slackware boot entry. I checked efibootmgr -v several times but after boot, it is completely gone.

So I googled about the UEFI boot entry and found that there is a fallback filename.

http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloa....html#register

Because I'm happy about Slackware, don't need any other, the slackware bootloader alone will be registered.

So I mounted ESP, created a directory, copied files and renamed elilo. So now I have

bootx64.efi is actually elilo.efi.

And now I see the login screen, as usual.

Thank you very much.

Regards,
sungjin

OK. I admit that my previous posts did not tell the exact description what I have done. I'm sorry for that. I think I was a little bit frustrated.

First, I tried Didier Spaier's patched installer. Sorry. It failed.

Second, bassmadrigal suggested booting from 64bit-current install disc, but there's no pre-made installation disc. So I gave up this method.

And brogr suggested a usb install from usb-and-pxe-installers from current Slackware tree. I tested it. But it failed too.

I suspect that the mainboard I use (MSI Z270-A PRO) might not work well with the Linux. Especially Slackware. Or maybe it's related to the efibootmgr. I also tried Ubuntu, and it installs boot loader correctly. Ubuntu uses efibootmgr version 0.12, while Slackware uses 0.5.4.

I know that my solution is not quite good, because if there's another OS, then it will be somewhat troublesome to leave a boot loader in /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT, however, since Slackware is the only OS I installed, it does not matter a lot.

Best regards,
sungjin

Congratulations with getting the stuff working. Still, how did you do the setup/install?

Did this not work (from: Slackware/README_UEFI.TXT)?
With running elilo one ends up with
and the kernel, init.gz and an elilo.conf should be copied there as well.

On my system the old windows bootloader was in EFI/boot and I needed to get it from the topspot of the boot-loaders shown by efibootmgr -v (i.e. needed to change boot-order)

BTW if you want to have another system booting; on that rodbooks-site you will have seen refind. Works fine on Slackware; great guide here:https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:sl...d_on_slackware

Apologies, the -current installer is pretty well-known on these forums, but I suppose not everywhere. Eric Hameleers (Alien Bob), who is one of the core Slackware team members, makes them available on his personal server.

http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/sla...4-current-iso/

You can also use his script mirror-slackware-current.sh to build your own ISO (which will also mirror the sources to your computer).