[GTALUG] New Build Computer?

[Peter King]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2020 at 10:41:50PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
 
> Superstitious mode:
> 
> - update the motherboard firmware if there is newer firmware.
>   Sometimes things like this are bugs in the firmware.

Did that, so it should be good to go...

> MBR booting and UEFI booting are very different.  Your old system (and
> its disks) might have been set up for MBR booting.  Your new system by
> default will only do UEFI booting. You can change this by turning on
> CSM and "legacy booting".  Could this be the source of your problems?

The old system booted UEFI, indeed EFI-stub.  The NVMe drive is formatted
with an EFI "boot" partition as VFAT-32 and a regular root partition as
ext4 -- pretty standard fare.

> - your new system's UEFI firmware, by default, will only offer to boot
>   from things that have an ESP (EFI System Partition, a FAT
>   filesystem).
> 
> - CSM should only be needed if you boot MBR-style (i.e. not UEFI)

Ahh, I didn't know that.

> - was your old system (from which the disks were removed) using MBR or
>   UEFI booting?  If it was using MBR, and you wish to boot from those
>   disks, you will need to enable "legacy booting" or whatever
>   euphemism the firmware uses.

Right.  It wasn't, and I don't; that was the point behind putting in the
NVMe drive.
 
> - It might make sense to install a bootable Linux system with at least
>   the ESP on your new NVMe
>   drive.  UEFI booting involves running some .efi file from the ESP.
>   That Linux could mount the filesystems from your old disks (but not
>   /boot/esp).

That's what I'm trying to do!  But the motherboard won't see it as a
"bootable drive" (nor does it see the old SSD as a bootable drive).

Admittedly, when I was in the chroot to the old root filesystem and then
tried to use efibootmgr to write the parameters of the NVMe drive to the
system, it claimed to have "installed" only the USB flash drive, not the
new NVMe system.  I have no idea why.  While chrooted I could run pacman,
modify files, do all the sorts of things one can normally do within the
confines of a chroot (so nothing that involved systemd running at boot).
It's ... odd.   All the more so since this is, it seems, a fairly popular
motherboard in the linux world...

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king at utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		   (416)-946-3170 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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