retitle 708430 need to also install grub to the removable media fallback path? thanks
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 06:28:52PM +0000, Alberaan ...y seré por siempre Alberaan wrote: >Package: grub-efi-amd64 >Version: 1.99-27+deb7u1 Hi Alberaan, Thanks for reporting the bug as I requested. :-) >We have been having trouble trying to boot to a debian system. Just >after a correct installation, debian didn't boot. The "Toshiba" logo >from my pc was stuck. Someone on #debian-boot told me he thought this >is what was happening: > >http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/4125.html Yep, it seems this was the core of your problem. The suggestion to use Ubuntu's rescue-boot script only confused things further, hence why it took so long to diagnose the problem. >Using debian installer in rescue mode, we did (sda1 being boot >partition, sda2 the / partition): > >mkdir /target >mount /dev/sda2 /target >mount /dev/sda1 /target/boot/efi >mount --bind /sys /target/sys >mount --bind /proc /target/proc >mount --bind /dev /target/dev >chroot /target > >cd /boot/efi/EFI >mkdir boot >cp debian/grubx64.efi boot/bootx64.efi > >We then rebooted and it worked. Yes. grub-installer was correctly creating and installing the grubx64.efi executable in a valid path and attempting to instruct your laptop's firmware to boot it. BUT: it seems that the firmware is buggy and ignores EFI boot entries when they are created. By copying the grub executable to the fallback removable media path, your machine will now boot. This temporarily solves your problem with booting. The problem with doing this is that at some point in the future when you upgrade to a newer version of the grub package, things will stop working. Newer versions of the grub-efi-amd64-bin package will replace the debian/grubx64.efi file and the modules that it loads, but *won't* replace the temporary copy we've made in boot/bootx64.efi. At some point, compiler changes or internal grub changes are likely to break compatibility between the old grub binary and new modules and at that point your bootloader will break again. Fundamentally, the bug here is in the firmware of your Toshiba laptop. Alberaan, Could you please tell us more details of the laptop? Ideally we would like to have the model number and the firmware revision so that we can log that information somewhere for future users. Secondly (and this is more to Colin): as we've now seen this failure mode in the wild in more than one case, I think that we need to add (optional?) code to grub-install to tell it to *also* install to the fallback removable media path. We could do a few things here: (a) use a blacklist of known-bad make/model/firmware versions and automatically trigger the fallback installation when we detect one (b) do the Windows thing: always install to the fallback path if nobody else already has; we'd need to detect if the previously-installed fallback file is from an older version of grub-efi and if so upgrade it (c) ask the user the question (and store their answer in /etc or debconf or *somewhere*): "do you want to install to the fallback path too?" What do you think? -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. [email protected] "Because heaters aren't purple!" -- Catherine Pitt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
