[GTALUG] Boot fails into Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: sciguy via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| 1) I noticed two swap partitions. Was that me being absent-minded when I did
| the installation/upgrade a year ago? Then I noticed:

That should just work.  But I always go for simplicity.


| 2) There are also two (2) EFI partitions. One installed 2 years ago, and one
| installed almost exactly a year ago (I would say that is about when the
| unexplained reboot failures happened. Both EFI partitions are on the same
| physical drive.

The UEFI standard allows multiple ESPs (EFI System Partitions) on one 
drive.

I have heard that Windows gets confused when there are multiple ESPs.

I don't know of a reason why it would be good idea.

There are cases where it makes sense to have an ESP on more than one disk.


| I am fine with deleting one of the swap partitions, but is it ok to delete one
| of the EFI partitions, more than likely the newer one? The older one is listed
| as sdd2 (sdd1 is a windows recovery partition), and the newer one is sdd7.

I imagine that the best course of action is to merge the contents of the 
second ESP into the first, and then delete the second.

You might find that the UEFI firmware tries to boot from the deleted ESP.  
Oops!

If you use efibootmgr(8), with the -v flag, you should be able to see 
what's going on.

Beware: the last portion of a boot entry for Windows is in UTF16, 
something that comes out badly on the console.  If you run the command 
without -v, you might see the structure better.

You can edit the entries with efibootmgr too.

There are a lot of defferences between UEFI setup screens.  I don't know 
what yours can do.