First UEFI/elilo system (14.2/x86_64) will not boot after installation
 

When Slackware's finished with the DVD it opens the optical drive door so the disk can be removed, then reboots when directed to. First time ever this reboot fails for me: told to specify a boot disk or put a bootable image on a device it can see. I'll explain what I did and ask to be shown where I went off the track.

The Asus motherboard's boot priority is the optical drive (labeled P2), then the SSD (sda, labeled P0); the second drive, sdb labeled P1, is not bootable. Perhaps I missed setting /dev/sda1 (a EFI disk formatted fat32) as bootable? I did not see that option when formatting the disk (type GPT) with cfdisk.

After partitioning (/dev/sda1 is the EFI vat32 allotted 100m; /dev/sda2 is swap allotted 32G, and /dev/sda3 is / alloted the rest of the 240G SSD), I ran setup, formatted swap, /dev/sda3, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2, and /dev/sdb3) as ext4.

Installed everything but the KDE languages and games.

Told the installer to skip installing lilo in the MBR, and not make a USB boot disk. Assumed that the default boot image was the huge one like on all previous installations. I intended to point elilo.config to the generic kernel and have the huge kernel as a backup (as all other systems have been configured) after rebooting.

Set up the network for this server/workstation, and the mouse driver. Retrieved the DVD and tried rebooting.

Where should I start looking for the reason it won't boot without the distribution DVD?

Are you sure that your BIOS set to "secure boot" (for UEFI) or similar and not "legacy" or something?

I have that issue with one of my HP's.

You need to set the BIOS to UEFI mode (either UEFI only or UEFI first, legacy second), Secure Boot off, and CSM (Compatibility Support Module) on. If you weren't offered a chance to set up elilo then it's likely these options were not set properly.

Probably you made a mistake editing elilo.conf or failed to have the kernel and initrd properly copied to the EFI system partition.

I would take too much time to find out exactly, so just reinstall but this time accept to make an USB boot stick (it would have allowed you to boot the installed system then make the needed fixes), and just set the system to use the huge kernel (this is the default), this is far less prone to errors. Yiou do not have to edit elilo.conf at all, the installer will write it and install elilo for you.

When the system will be installed and only then, you will be able to add a lilo stanza to elilo.conf for the generic kernel, keeping the one for the huge kernel just in case.

Pat, Didier, Skaendo:

Found the source of the problem: I forgot that the 14.2 DVD marks the bit-ness of the version on the _same_ side of the disk rather than the opposite site. So, I put the installation disk in the optical drive with 'x86_64' up and, therefore, installed the 32-bit version. I just tested this by mounting the disk in this host and seeing the directories listed. Sigh.

So, I'll re-install the distribution -- with the 'x86_64' _down_.

Sigh,

Rich

Just completed the re-installation ensuring it is the 64-bit version and I have the same results: it won't boot off the SSD (explicitly selected in the BIOS setup screen). The screen reads,

"Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key"

Any and all ideas are needed!

Rich

Were you prompted to install elilo during installation? That would help determine if you booted the installer in the UEFI or legacy mode.

Further to bassmadrigal's suggestion: can you check whether the EFI partition actually got the expected files? After mounting the EFI partition under /boot/efi you would expect something like this:
if not, there is nothing to boot

bassmadrigal, brobr, et al.:

With local help (from a SBo package maintainer and hardware guru) we got the new desktop properly booting. It turns out that on the Asus Sabertooth fx990 BIOS version I have there are two places to set boot order. The one on the main BIOS page was correctly set, the second one -- on one of the Advanced sub-menus -- I had either not seen or not recognized its significance. Changing that one to look first at the optical drive, then at the vfat32 partition on /dev/sda1/ did the trick. Saving the configuration and rebooting brought up the elilo installation on the 14.2 DVD.

Installation went quickly (with 8 cores on the CPU and 16G RAM) and it now boots from /dev/sda1/ as it should.

My thanks to all of you,

Rich