[sf-lug] Any SF-LUG bootloader heroes?

[Ken Shaffer]

It's a new world with secure boot/UEFI, and from your kernel boot line in
grub, you are attempting to boot the signed kernel, so you must have secure
boot on, have an EFI partition, and a gpt partitioned disk.  When you do a
grub-install on such a system, the critical part is the --uefi-secure-boot
switch (sp?) so the grub files get written to the efi partition (which
should be mounted at /boot/efi).  Looks like a mix of old MBR stuff got
used.  As for the jumping devices, definitely use the uuid on the kernel
boot lines in grub.cfg, not /dev/sda8 , the device letters were wrong in
too many cases (like the initial install from a USB live media to another
USB).  Since Ubuntu 12.04, I have seen many more cases of the system
booting with the hard disk on sdb instead of sda -- not consistent, but not
that rare anymore either.  With secure boot, and the EFI partition on a
disk not where the system will be running, you will see the grub hdx
confusion -- maybe just an extension of the sda/sdb problems -- is hd0
supposed to be the first hard disk, or the boot (maybe usb) disk?    When
grub.cfg is split across disks, (which the Ubuntu13.04 seems to do by
default), maybe confusion is expected.  And yea, some machines, even with
the corrected grub windows chainloader commands, still cannot boot Windows
(bug 1091464).  You need to use the efi menu to select Windows to boot (or
leave it the default).
Good Luck


On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Shane Tzen (shane at faultymonk.org):
>
> > On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 1:52 PM, Michael Scheper
> > <sf-lug at michaelscheper.com>wrote:
> >
> > > The whole sad story is here:
> > >
> > > http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=132928&p=718053
> >
> >
> > A little long, so I've only skimmed it.  Looking at it, my instinct is
> that
> > your boot issue is not grub, but...
> >
> > * I don't see where your / or root fs partition is (on either disk)
> > * since the error you have is actually the kernel not able to mount /,
> try
> > to see if you can manually mount / under the live cd.
> > * if you can mount / under the live cd, check /etc/fstab and see what's
> > defined as / and make sure that exists.
> > * if it's not already, change device names to blkid (`blkid` under the
> live
> > cd).
> >
> > In general, two things cause the kernel panic unable to mount root fs
> > errors that you see.  First is that the grub config is wrong.  Second is
> > that the /etc/fstab on your / is wrong.
>
> What he said.
>
> One of the other things live CDs are handy for is sanity-checking your
> partition table (or EFI GPT thingie).  You know, make sure partition
> boundaries are correct and don't overlap, that the 'Active' flag is set
> as desired (old-school partition tables), and so on.  And you can
> force-install what you want to the MBR program area (old-school
> partition tables).
>
> FWIW, I'm still loathing GRUB.  _Way_ too damned baroque.  If I had to
> use an EFI-based system, I think I'd probably go with elilo.
> http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/elilo.html
>
>
>
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