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Search - "efi"
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So I decided to give Linux a try again.
Created live usb. Prepared myself to go through all the hassles at the beginning.
Booted in live USB. I can't see mouse cursor.
Searched in google, apparently a common problem with GTX 1070/1080 graphics cards.
Installed proprietary nvidia drivers with keyboard only. Took me about 20 minutes.
Finally managed to get the mouse cursor and install ubuntu. Time to boot and smell the fresh air of linux again.
Sound card doesn't work. Even the integrated mobo sound card doesn't work. Looked for a solution, found the bug in lunchpad but not solution yet. Everyone recommending to buy an external sound card.
I can't code without music. Decided to remove linux.
Booted back to Windows and removed linux partition. That fucked up my bootloader although I installed linux's efi loader completely separately.
Now I am sitting in front of my computer, with black grub screen, while trying to make a Windows 10 usb with my 7 years old broken laptop.
Next time I see a rant about Windows 10 that glorifies linux, I swear I'm gonna smack your face over standard TCP/IP47 -
Sister comes into my room
"Can you look at moms laptop, it stopped working I'm scared I broke it"
Ask why
"Idk it just stopped working, all I did was install adobe flash player I dont think that could do it could it?"
Top kek
Take a look
"EFI IPV4 0 (error code) failed to boot"
Weird. Enter bios
"Hard drive: [Not detected]"
Well, that's no bueno
Pop open back, hard drive is loose
Pfft, push that fucker back in
Boot -> works
"Mom is going to kill me I broke it im so worried" -> relieved laughter
Adobeflashplayerkilledmyharddrive.jpg
Shook.exe14 -
Me: *reinstalling windows10 using the recovery disk.
"Your partitions will be reformatted if needed... warnings this, that... Continue?"
Me: do it already!
"Recovering... 1%..."
.
.
"Recovering... 1%..."
.
.
"Sorry cannot recover. We didn't change anything."
Me: *reboot
.
.
.
.
"No bootable drive found"
YOU MOTHERFUCKING LIAR! *throws away the thumb drive with the laptop attached out of spite22 -
I hate asking for help on here as this place is mostly not intended for that but fuck it for now, I need help on this one!
Installing Arch isn't working for me. Installing any other Linux system (debian or RHEL based) works great.
I've seen some things online about EFI files and so on but I honestly don't understand what that stuff is (about).
Help.16 -
So my laptop is a Lenovo y50-70 and it's quite good. The keyboard is amazing compared to most other Laptops I've tried the screen is nice, it's durable and it's got some decent specs. With it (and also my desktop) I dual boot Kubuntu and Windows 10.
About three years ago I decided I wanted to reinstall both OS' since they were starting to get cluggered. Lo and behold I wasn't able to do that because, and I quote: "EFI USB Device boot failed".
Hours were spent trying to Google different things to the point where I was even desperate enough to go beyond page 0 on the different searches with (as you might have guessed), no luck. "Fuck that" I thought. It worked and I could clean it manually anyway.
Fast forward to the last part of August this year where I upgraded my Kubuntu from 17.10 to 18.04 and shit got weird. You can read more about it here:
https://reddit.com/r/kde/...
but the TL;DR is in the link. Windows was also quite annoing as well (but don't take my word for it).
As you might understand it made me really frustrated. I couldn't update my BIOS since they were already at the current version, but one way or another I had to fix it. After a while was almost about to give up when I decided to give this:
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/...
a go. It was weird though. Like imagine the conversation:
"Can't boot from USB bro, what do I do?"
"Just update your kernel, bro"
Well IT. FUCKING. WORKED.
So I imideatly installed Linux and have just now bothered installing Windows (since all of the teachers are vacation so I had plenty of time to set it all up).
But got damn.4 -
Installed Manjaro KDE, updated macOS, updated Windows and fixed the mess in the EFI made by those actions.
And now it’s time for screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/KviNx
(high-res imgur link)4 -
Bought a new 4TB disk for my gaming rig, pulled out the old 1TB one and plugged it back on my old machine. Installed Ubuntu Server. Instalation went well after I figured I needed the IOMMU turned on.
Later went to play some BfA on the gaming rig and... No boot disk recognized. Ahn?
My SSD is plugged in. SATA cable is well seated. Thing was working not 30min before...
After a loooong time trying to figure out if it was hardware or micro$hit's Windows 10, I finally figured it:
It seems Windows installed its EFI partition on the old HDD. So my SSD is basically a single, large NTFS volume. Now I need to download the Win10 ISO, boot up the install disk and use the cmd prompt to create a new EFI partition on my SSD. Ugh.
Fucking Windows didn't think to install its boot manager on its own disk. "Nah, just gonna use this random magnetic disk here". Why? My login queues are already huge on WoW, why must this wankstain of an OS annoy me even more?3 -
Created Linux instalation flashdrive on my notebook like thousand times before. Simple dd if=img of=/dev/sdb . Tried installing system from it but somehow doesn't work. And the it hit me. I have both magmetic drive and SSD in my laptop! So insted of flashdrive, I have bootable beging of my SSD where my encrypted lvm used to be :-( Luckilly I lost just EFI, boot, swap, rootfs, few git repositories and ccache.6
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Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.
So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.
As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?
Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.
Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.
Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.
Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.
Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!
Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems
2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch
Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)
A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!
Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner
Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.9 -
i asked my dad for help with a GRUB issue (EFI file wasn't seen in my BIOS anymore, nor booted when pointed directly at, even after ALL THE CONFIGURATIONS POSSIBLE) and i walked away for a while, content he'd figure it out (there's still a few things he knows more than me about.) I come back 30 minutes later and he's zero-filled my main drive and is halfway through installing Win10. His reasoning? "I'm installing surveillance software since you won't give me your college passwords and I need access to your college's site and your account. I can't do that on Debian."
I didn't give him authorization for this, and I thought he had zeroed my backups drive too, but it turns out it was having I/O issues (my controller is finicky sometimes, a boot cycle with it removed fixed it, luckily I can't write to drives it doesn't like when it's being a shithead)
What do? I can't sue as he owns almost everything I use and the house I live in and would no doubt kick me out and take all "my" stuff, but I feel like this really can't go ignored. I can't just talk to him about it as he thinks anything he wants done has to be done as he sees himself as above all other people, so he just shouts me down...24 -
This is a rant thats been waiting a long time to be said...
About half a year ago I got a refurbished laptop, and decided to run manjaro on it (primarily because I didn't have the time to setup arch). I spent time configuring it, I tried out different things, and all in all I learnt tons about linux, and just random things about computers in general.
I dont regret this in the slightest!
Despite the many times where something went horribly wrong, like after I moved over to efi (without a hitch, actually!) I forgot to add to fstab my esp and f-ed the whole boot system. Or when, right in the beginning of this adventure, I tried to move over Xorg to my nvidia gpu and left optimus on. Big Mistake! But I learnt, and I came out a better sysadmin, a better dev than when I first went in.
And again, I dont regret it in the slightest!2 -
I'm in sad nostalgia....
32MB BIOS updates take a loooong time.
Reset...
Hey. i'm updatinf the LED firmware.
Reset again.
Hey. I needed to reset all settings.
BIOS.
Fan detection for min rate.
Dozen settings changed.
Laggy mouse because EFI and graphics is slooooow...
I miss the old days of just keyboard based BIOS. And where updating didn't take 15 mins....2 -
Windows Update error code 0x800f0922 indicates that it's run out of space on the System Reserved partition.
Partition is safely expandable if the start sector stays the same on MBR drives or at any position on EFI/GPT setups.
that was fun to figure out, only took like 3 hours to do2 -
I should've read about installing ubuntu, now I'm facing grub-efi-amd4-signed GRUB Installation failed error7
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Why the fuck does windows use 100MB for the efi partition? Like oh hey I will exactly allocate enough space for me. Oh you want ArchLinux and NixOs too? Well fuck you have fun dangouresly moving around partition just to increase the fucking size of the efi partition I just allocated at install-time without ever asking you about it.6
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My experience with Fedora:
1. Copy to thumb drive
2. Find out the thumb drive wasn't good enough
3.copied to another thumb drive
4.Successfully booted
5.start installation
6.Shit forgot to partition my NTFS drives
7.Back to Windows to do it
8.back to install again
9.Start installation, setup partitioning
10. Didnt notice that my EFI partition wasn't detected
11.Fedora tries to install its bootloader in God knows what place
12.bootloader install fail
13.reboot comp
14. Missing operating system
15. Spend my whole fucking night repairing the boot partition and the problem was a fuckin missing BOOT flag
16. No grub
17.spent another decade trying to fix it
18. Give up and get some sleep
Probably Fedora will have to wait for another day, tiring experience7 -
Trying to install Linux on an HP Stream 7 has been way more difficult than it should have been, even when you take into account that it's a 32-bit processor with a 32-bit EFI!
First off, the only thing I've been able to get it to boot right of the bat is Android x86 and BlissOS... kind of. You would think that Android x86 would be perfect for a tablet, right? Nope, performance sucked sooooo bad.
After reading some forums, I was finally able to get Ubuntus to load up... with the limiting factor being no on-screen keyboard.
So... at the moment I guess I'm stuck with a useless Windows tablet, and probably will be for a long time (you know, since 32-bit architecture is being dropped)6 -
How to replace rEFInd bcuz M$ locks linux out of your system if M$ installed first.
-----
This will be long so get your salsa ready.
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1. Get your rEFInd from sourceforge
Since we are installing INTO windows, dl the zip.
2. extract to a folder.
2-a-: Install themes if you want any or edit the config if you want/need to, at this stage.
3. open a cmd as Admin and cd to the refind's folder.
4. mount system volume
`mountVol S: /S` will mount it to S:
5. use xcopy to copy as system
`xcopy /E refind-bin-x.xx.x\ S:\EFI\refind`
6tynice: go to System volume and to the refind folder
`S:`
`cd EDI\refind\refind`
7:Set rEFInd as Windows Boot Manager
`bcdedit /set {bootmgr} \EFI\refind\refind\refind_x64.efi`
(It's possible to use ia32 or aa64 for different architectures)
At this point, try plugging a linux thumb drive and restart your computer. Windows Boot Manager should be deactivated and should show refind.
You can use mouse and keyboard to select an OS boot or just set config to start one automatically unless you are holding a "power" button.
rEFInd also offers "fallback" boot for linux, which boots the efi from rEFInd and not from syslinux.4 -
How the heck does nvram magically forget your boot entries while your system is up...
Worst reboot of windows I've experienced in a long time, ugh.
The boot/*.efi files are still present but no entries in the menu... -
TLDR; windows sucks donkey balls
Sometime ago I started to get battery issues on my laptop using windows. Even with 100% charge it would soon display 0% when unplugged.
A few months back I switched to linux on my laptop and on my desk station. And to my surprise, battery issues dissapeared while using linux (manjaro i3). Anybody had that same problem?
Anyway I dual boot win 10 and linux just in case I'd need windows, and this week I noticed my root parition didn't have any space left.
For the next few hours I'm in a car so I thought hey great time to reinstall linux with a bigger root partition. I already had reinstalled windows, and with all the bloat removed, I could shrink my windows partition to make more space for linux.
Now all I need to do is prepare a usb stick with the manjaro iso. I could do that in linux, but since reinstalling windows killed my grub bootloader I couldn't boot up manjaro.
Right, so in windows I go and want to create this bootable EFI usb stick from the manjaro iso. Now the battery issue kicks in again, stating 0%. But with luck, the usb creation finished without my machine dying. Now I just need to restart my laptop and boot from the usb and .... Crap. my Laptop doesn't boot up anymore
-_-
Now i need to wait for a plug to be able to power it up again. Once I boot from the usb I'm sure I could use the laptop some more hours until the battery is actually dead. Fuck windows5 -
I hate servers that only support EFI boot with a passion. Yes, legacy / BIOS boot is old, but it was so simple. I've been spending hours trying to get EFI boot working on servers with swraid-ed disks and *nothing* works without ugly hackish patches all over!
Anyone successfully got an EFI partition (/boot/efi) on an MDRaid device? D':4 -
Am I the only one staying on the old MBR thing because of it simplicity ? All my friends are struggling installing Arch with the EFI shit, while I did manage to install it in 10m without a lot of linux skills9
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whelp. fuck you grub2
fuck you for presneting yourself as a problem to be solved all over again.
fuck you for the efi partition containing a search for the fucking boot/efi partition by uuid
fuck my host system for taking a cloned drive and fucking around because it couldn't tell which drive the uuid was emanating from
fuck them using entries files with linux options specifying the uuid of the root partition which ALSO now must have a subvol parameter supplied to a rootoptions parameter to find the fucking root drive
fuck them for making it look like the fucking software is smarter than it seems.
and fuck them for not creating some kind of autoprobe fucking utility added to teh initial boot drive which is smart enough to load a stub of grub2 and then pull in teh rest of the slice partitions it shouldn't be using in the first place
and fuck you fedora for using btrfs in the first place and mounting a different partition for linux images and yet another under /boot/efi
and fuck you virtualbox for not producing teh shit the kernel finds IMMEDIATELY once in rescue mode !!!7 -
Compiled Gentoo after ~5 days.
It's not ever yet though.
My kernel is now 7.3M, and it contains almost everything I need. Even my network drivers (intel) firmware is built-in.
It boots straight off UEFI (default BOOT/bootx64.efi), and
Managed to install X, Waylan (sway!)
Got dvorak programmer's keyboard defaulted.
df -h:
root 4.7G/14G (exact) used
boot 21M/127M (exact) used
var 701M/~5.5G used
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH
Was doing the installation from a Live CD (UEFI) during school hours, with my toughpad not working and no mouse with me. I feel bad for TAB.
I am, at this moment, still compiling...1 -
I just wanna cry rn, I'm not even mad. Something happened while trying to install High Sierra on my third partition and somehow both my drives (HDD and SSD) stopped working. Nothing boots. Files? Probably gone. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I was careful, I didn't click or execute anything I didn't know. How? Just... How?
Now I have to hope my important stuff is still there and I can recover it. If it's just the EFI fucked up, ok, I can fix it. If the partition table is fucked up (most probable) idk if I can fix it, hopefully I can. AAARGH
There goes my entire day or even the entire weekend... All because I don't own a piece of shit of an iPhone and needed an emulator to try to reproduce an issue on a fucking webapp for a client.8 -
Wasted 8 hours today trying to convince Windows to boot.
Yesterday I deleted two unused partitions. Today no OS booted up. Guess what, diskpart (think parted for Windows) reindexes GPT partitions on any modification. So when I deleted partition #1, my EFI System Partition, previously #2, became #1. But UEFI was still trying to boot from partition #2.
Linux booted after recreating UEFI boot entry. 1 minute job, no tools required. Windows, though... Bootrec /rebuildbcd failed, bcdedit failed, recreating ESP from scratch failed spectacularly. Finally I made a clean install just to get proper ESP and restored OS from backup.
Dammit, Windows. Why do you have to make things that hard.4 -
Well fuck...
Korora 26 finally came out and I wanted to install it on my new laptop. I'd previously put Ubuntu MATE on there, with Cinnamon kind of tacked on, but it wasn't great, mostly because it wasn't Korora.
Unfortunately, Korora (and Fedora) still have a bug in the installer where it will complain if your /boot/efi partition is not on /dev/sda, which in my case it was on my M.2 drive. However, I was able to eventually get it working.
But when I booted it up and tried to log in, it would take me back to the log in screen. I logged into a TTY, where I was reminded that when I had set up my Ubuntu install, I had chosen to encrypt the home folder.
Not knowing how to set up the eCryptFS with an existing encrypted home folder setup, I opted to wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch--I had a backup of most of my files from the Ubuntu installation. However, I lost some very important documents that I'd set up since then.
Fast forward to today where my laptop won't boot unless it is either a.) unplugged with just the battery or b.) plugged in without the battery, with a different power cable from the one I got with the computer.
Thankfully the people responded quickly after I mentioned I was having issues. Hopefully it doesn't get worse... -
I like manjaro and hate architect...
On my Windows I created an empty space to write the linux there. Booted up the architect flash drive, completed some steps, now partitioning. EFI boot partition, swap, home, root I am going to set em' up.
> Automatic partitioning
Ehm, why not? It warns that it will create new partitions. I created free space in my SSD so its ok isn't it? Surely, it will detect that there is a big enough space to create partitions there. I've lost my Windows, projects, files, docs. Fuck them. Fuck them again. Who the fuck created that automatic partitioning?2 -
So there I have a laptop in dual boot efi that starts directly to mint and has Windows as secondary os. As much as i appreciate mint for being Linux, I cannot really understand why does my laptop last twice as much on Windows on moderate saving settings, regardless of what I'm doing. Colleague who talked me into mint told me it would shorten battery life only by a slight bit. Can anyone tell me how is that possible or how to improve mints battery life?4
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I am currently fixing the EFI partition from my laptop's SSD on my gf's computer on a livebooted image of some random Linux. Anyone know if its possible that no bootloader can boot if there isnt any room on the EFI part? Oh yeah, and only a single mouse out of 3 works for some reason, and no keyboard... so I am using the onscreen keyboard -_-'2
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All right, my sleep cycle is officially screwed. Go find a fix for it in my missing EFI-boot partition...3
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Let me tell you about my wonderful weekend. It all started with a game that doesn't run in wine and it ended up in the biggest nightmare of Windows Update and EFI configuration.
1 - let's boot on my Windows partition to play trackmania 2.
2 - Windows Update interrupts me while driving a track.
3 - Update keep failing over and over again.
4 - I keep trying things to fix Windows Update, but with no success.
5 - Let's try system restore, failed
6 - Let's try to do a reset. "You don't have a recovery drive". Oh, right...
7 - Let's try to upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 10, just because. Nope, "we could not determine if your pc can run Windows 10". Wait what....
8 - I guess I'll be reinstalling this trash. "Nope, can't. Don't like that partition I just formatted". Of course you can't...
9 - Had to delete the partition and let it create new ones. It created a new EFI partition. Just why???
10 - Okay that worked. Let's fix grub now.
11 - Maybe not, let's try rEFInd, because it looks fancy.
12 - After rebooting on the live USB for about 50 times and reconfiguring rEFInd without any luck, I realised the install script didn't install fs drivers for ext4. Oh, right... That's why you didn't find any Linux kernel...
13 - It can't boot windows, they're using a different EFI partition. Let's move rEFInd to the new EFI partition windows created for me.
14 - Finally everything works again. So much effort to play a freaking game without being bothered by windows update. And rEFInd abience theme looks beautiful.
I've got to say though, I learned a lot and the Arch wiki is awesome!6 -
!rant
Guys need help. I have dual booted Antergos with existing Windows 10. After installating Antergos it did not boot, Windows 10 was booting directly.
So I fired a command in Windows 10 cmd
bcdedit set {bootmgr} /boot/efi
And then I was able to boot into Antergos via Grub bootloader.
Now the problem is that I can not see Windows 10 option in Grub bootloader.
I tried to Google the solution and I came to the conclusion that if I install the Grub again system should automatically detect the Windows installation.
But I'm not sure where to start. Has anyone faced this problem beofre?
Please help :)5 -
some recent discoveries of mine:
- DOS FDISK has totally-undocumented CLI (partitioning with auto-format and OTF drive mapping... like one OEM used it for their machine recovery discs and no one else even knows it exists) docs coming soon (this is a lie i found this a year or two ago but forgot till yesterday)
- nuitka is a fucking blessing and the man who made it deserves so much love for it
- my existence is one massive waste of time
- apparently some B450 boards require you to hit a button and test your fans' min/max values and it takes like an hour and IT STILL DOESN'T MAKE THEM VISIBLE FROM THE OS ASROCK YOU FUCKS
- the new Ryzen took my latest project's compile time from 30 hrs to like 6 because I can compile 12 things at once instead of just 4
- installing debian sucks ass now, they forgot to push part of apt to the 10.3 stable installer so you just can't install shit through apt until you fix that, though dpkg works
- apparently they pushed a grub-efi-amd64 version that breaks all efivars??? i know debian sid is like meant to be unstable but a bug like that should never have even been rolled into a package till it was fixed like ???????????
- depression sucks ass11 -
had a blast helping a pal install arch (and setting up the necessities, like i3-gaps, neofetch, wal, etc...). tonight was awesome.
PS: i can recite any basic arch install by memory now, EFI or BIOS, and i'm slightly better at navigating vim now5 -
I installed Ubuntu... I messed up and I deleted the EFI entry of a NTFS hard drive in which I have all my important data... The NTFS deasapeared... Do you have any tool to recommend to recover my data... 😫😫3
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Piggy backing off an earlier rant about Linux. Let's talk about time wasted fixing Linux.
One time for me was I couldn't get Ubuntu to boot. Whenever it booted through UEFI it would go straight to the EFI bash like command line boot screen, not allowing me to access Ubuntu.
I tried for almost a full day to fix it, Googling solutions, resetting my BIOS and fixing Boot using a Ubuntu Live USB.
In the end I found it was an issue with setting my filesystem as XFS. I reinstalled using EXT4 and it booted right up. Must've been some sort of bug. Strange because XFS boot worked with Fedora. A day wasted trying to set up Ubuntu.6 -
!dev
Any experienced arch linux user ?
EFI is not available in the system .
Grub is not installing .
System runs on bios .
What to do ?10 -
So I can't believe I'm asking this again. But where the fuck is the source code for BOOTX64.efi for linux ?
And why when i run strings BOOTX64.efi does the word microsoft show up ?32 -
I have two identical machine configurations. Somehow one of the two is so badly fucked up by EFI boot that it still won't boot from anything other than the SSD or EFI. Even a bios reset won't fix it.
How do I even go about resetting EFI? I just need the thing to boot from the damn disk. (it's workstation grade mobo, has vPro and that other nonsense, I think it's a Q87 chipset)8 -
Aw the beauty of chroot
Now if only I knew how yo setup an efi partition and grub for a specific mounted disk img to a specific booy partition! -
I have been working on a long time, low progress project of mine that keeps on giving and giving.
Let's begin like two years ago where I dipped my toes into "more then gigabit" networking thanks to a Linus Techtips video about infiniband.
I had the dream of booting my Workstation from my NAS, a so called diskless setup.
Well, since I run FreeNAS on my Nas , a very nice Freebsd based Nas OS, everything's gonna be good.
In the beginning, there was no infiniband support.
Turns out, you don't need it, since the mellanox CX2 nics can do ETH too.
Yay.
Just took me a few weeks of anger.
So, to be able to boot something over the network, you need firmware that finds the bookable stuff and loads it.
That protocol and firmware is called PXE.
PXE needs a DHCP telling it what to do, and what is where and etc.
Freenas here I come! Installing dnsmasq on the actual freenas install turned out to be not that great of an idea because freenas thinks of itself as being an "appliance" that you don't fiddle with. So things work, until you update/ upgrade when everything will basically be wiped, except what you have done through the ui.
Ok. So I gona use a jail, a container like thing for that.
Everything is great, jail has internet, everything Installs fine, what could go wrong?
Dnsmasq can launch and work, but not as dhcp server. Some thing about permissions.
Turns out, jails have permission like things.
A few days of head scratching later, it has ALL the permissions.
Dnsmasq still can't work as DHCP server though, why you ask?
Because it needs a specific kernelmodule that isn't contained in the jail. Since jails are kind of like a docker container, they run on the same OS kernel, who does not have this module, I'd need to patch the freenas, which is an appliance, so fuck that.
Like a year later, freenas has finally added good VM support, so why not make a VM for the dhcpserver?
Well, about a year ago, I didn't know that the virtual Intel nic is a fucken unstable piece of garbage, crashing nearly any OS at some point.
So that was it for a while again.
Now to the last few weeks.
Finally dnsmasq is running in a freebsd VM with a good and working configuration which is rather simple, if those tutorial fuckers out there would explain shit instead of just telling you to copy, paste and replace X.
Now back to the PXE side.
I'm using iPXE because I have no clue how to boot anything over tftp so iSCSi it is, since that is what I can relate too.
The idea behind iscsi is to fake a SCSI disk over the network. Attached devices appear as if they are actually directly connected to the machine instead of over the network.
iPXE gets a lease from the server, can connect to it, everything is fucken great. Finally.
Except that if it "sanBoots" the iscsi drive, it can't find anything to boot.
Well fuck.
If I attach a Linux live USB over iscsi, it boots, finds grub, and crashes because the live iso isn't configured for network-boot.
But it boots.
So what's so different?
Well iPXE is booted in legacy mode, where as the content of the target is windows 10 in efi mode.
Ffff.
Ok. Can I get iPXE to boot in EFI mode?
Well yes, after like 3 days fiddling with it.
But it only finds the onboard Intel nic instead of the new Mellanox CX3 cards, and can't even connect to the target....
Sooo, I guess my options are as follows.
Either, get PXE efi to work on the network cards directly, its called flexboot and might be able to since I just found some firmware options for that.
Or give up on efi and install windows in legacy mode.
Which isn't that easy when it has to end up on a drive on my nas.