broken UEFI and live media

broken UEFI and live media

[Chris Brannon]

Something I've noticed recently is that every time I boot my UEFI
machine from live media, it always boots into legacy mode, even though
the aforementioned live media is supposed to support both UEFI and BIOS
mode.  Yeah, I've tried with a couple different live media: Talking Arch
and Grml.
Anyone know what's going on?

My suspicion is that the firmware sees that the device has both a
standard MBR with boot partition and a GPT partition table with an EFI
system partition, so it boots from the MBR first.

What's interesting is that when I did the initial install way back in
2012, I did get it to boot the installer in UEFI mode.  But that's
probably because back then, I had to hand-craft the image on the USB
stick to boot with UEFI.  I don't remember what I did back then.  I lost
the image, so I can't compare it to what is being done these days.

-- Chris

RE: broken UEFI and live media

[Kelly Prescott]

Chris, are you sure you don't have some preference set somewhere that forces it to try mbr first?
I boot live media all the time (mostly TalkingArch) and I get UEFI mode.
I do not boot from a cd, rather I write my stuff to USB sticks.
I use dd if=/file/to/write.iso of=/dev/usb-stick bs=1M
So far, it works except for Sonar.
To be fair, I haven't tried Sonar in a while though.
I have checked, and in the 2 systems I have in front of me, booting in UEFI is the default and it will boot from MBR if no UEFI boot is possible.
They are both Toshiba laptops.




-----Original Message-----
From: Speakup [mailto:speakup-bounces@linux-speakup.org] On Behalf Of Chris Brannon
Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2016 11:42 AM
To: speakup@linux-speakup.org
Subject: broken UEFI and live media

Something I've noticed recently is that every time I boot my UEFI machine from live media, it always boots into legacy mode, even though the aforementioned live media is supposed to support both UEFI and BIOS mode.  Yeah, I've tried with a couple different live media: Talking Arch and Grml.
Anyone know what's going on?

My suspicion is that the firmware sees that the device has both a standard MBR with boot partition and a GPT partition table with an EFI system partition, so it boots from the MBR first.

What's interesting is that when I did the initial install way back in 2012, I did get it to boot the installer in UEFI mode.  But that's probably because back then, I had to hand-craft the image on the USB stick to boot with UEFI.  I don't remember what I did back then.  I lost the image, so I can't compare it to what is being done these days.

-- Chris
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Re: broken UEFI and live media

[Chris Brannon]

"Kelly Prescott" <kprescott@coolip.net> writes:

> Chris, are you sure you don't have some preference set somewhere that forces it to try mbr first?

That's possible, and I wondered about that as well.  If so, it wasn't
anything I selected, so it got set "behind my back" somehow.  I need to
get someone with a working pair of eyes to look over all the settings
with me sometime.
Before I did that, I thought I'd see if there was something I might have
been missing.

Thanks,
-- Chris