[GLLUG] Debian and modern UEFI cmos

[Tim Woodall]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, Tim Woodall via GLLUG wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Nov 2018, MJ via GLLUG wrote:
>
>> Helo,
>> I 'ave a basic simple Q.
>> I have been scratching my head with latest Debian not giving me option to 
>> install
>> on modern motherboard.
>> It simply gives no option for this type of file system for  /boot/EFI
>> 
> Debian does support uefi 'out of the box' but I don't know whether it
> has an installer (I have my own home-brew usb key for installing)
>
> Can you boot the system at all (in which case it's 'just' getting the
> right files to the right place' or are you stuck getting it to boot at
> all?)
>

In /boot/efi/EFI/debian I have grubx64.efi. Which appears to be a copy
of /boot/grub/x86_64-efi/core.efi

I don't know where that has come from but I would assume that it was
created when either grub-efi, grub-efi-amd64, grub-efi-amd64-bin or
efibootmgr were installed.

I probably used efibootmgr to setup the EFI configuration but I don't
recall exactly what I did.

And I do remember that the EFI partition has to be of type "EFI System"
for my laptop to boot.


I also have a EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi and EFI/BOOT/grub.cfg - which I
recall were how I got the system to boot originally before I got the
version above installed.

Created like this:
grub-mkimage -o bootx64.efi -p /grub -O x86_64-efi \
  fat iso9660 part_gpt part_msdos \
  normal boot echo linux configfile loopback chain \
  efifwsetup efi_gop efi_uga \
  ls search search_label search_fs_uuid search_fs_file \
  gfxterm gfxterm_background gfxterm_menu test all_video loadenv \
  exfat ext2 ntfs btrfs hfsplus udf

(I wish now I'd made better notes when I did this - unfortunately, as is
so often the case, you only do these things once and go down a lot of
rabbit holes before you find wonderland so the notes you do make often
don't make sense when you come back to them...)

Tim.