[SOLVED] eliloconfig not working

mfoley · 02-20-2024, 01:35 PM

I thought I had all this UEFI stuff figured out, but apparently not. I've copied the root partition of a MBR boot drive to a new drive formatted to GPT. The partition table is:

Code:

Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: DC1E26F4-1500-4546-ABC5-F6F585289369

Device        Start        End    Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1      2048     411647     409600   200M EFI System
/dev/sda2    411648   12994559   12582912     6G Linux swap
/dev/sda3  12994560 1782579166 1769584607 843.8G Linux filesystem

While booted from the Slackware installation ISO in UEFI mode, I did:

Code:

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi

I then ran eliloconfig. I got the menu to "Istall ELILO on the EFI System Partition", then to select a chooser (I picked "Install a boot menu entry"), but after clicking OK, I got the message, "Could not open disk /dev/sdb: No such file or directory."

That's the first problem, why this message? There is no /dev/sdb device!

Even so, eliloconfig did create the /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/ files, including elilo.conf:

Code:

chooser=simple
delay=1
timeout=1
#
image=vmlinuz
        label=vmlinuz
        read-only
        append="root=/dev/sda2 vga=normal ro"

This is not my selected "chooser" and I don't know where it got /dev/sda2. I edited that to /dev/sda3 and copied /boot/vmlinuz-huge-4.4.301 to /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/vmlinuz. I then tried booting off /dev/sda (not DVD), but it wouldn't boot. It went right to the BIOS setup screen.

So what possibly many things have I done wrong?

Petri Kaukasoina · 02-20-2024, 02:08 PM

In the copied file system, is /etc/mtab a file? If it is, what does it contain? (eliloconfig uses mount to tell where the root and efi partitions are, and if mtab is not a link to /proc/mounts, it will contain leftovers from your previous system.)

mfoley · 02-20-2024, 08:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Petri Kaukasoina

In the copied file system, is /etc/mtab a file? If it is, what does it contain? (eliloconfig uses mount to tell where the root and efi partitions are, and if mtab is not a link to /proc/mounts, it will contain leftovers from your previous system.)

Genius! That was it! What I did initially to copy was boot from the DVD and mounted /dev/sda2 (the old MBR boot drive) and /dev/sdb3 (the new UEFI drive), then did a 'cp -arv' from sda2 to sdb3. After reading your post, when I chroot'ed to the UEFI drive (I'm leaving incidental steps out), and this time checked /etc/mtab, sda2 was in there as well a sdb3 (and sdb1 and sda1 as the efi partitions). I deleted the references to sdb, and changed sda2 to sda3, then did eliloconfig again. That worked! Except it still put chooser=simple in elilo.conf. No big deal on that -- probably a bug in the Slackware eliloconfig.

It never occurred to me that eliloconfig would look at the mtab file! I'll definitely make a note of this in my documentation. I guess the assumption is that the UEFI system is being installed from scratch and is sda. I suppose I could have switched the SATA cables so the UEFI drive would come up as sda, but again, who knew!

Thanks!