Hello, Peter.
On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 06:56:32 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:
[ .... ]
> I also have an Asus motherboard, but for Intel hardware.
> In your BIOS secure-boot page, do you have a section called Key Management?
> When I was working on getting my machine to boot, a year ago, I was advised*
> to hit the item "Load default keys". This was to clear out any dross that
> might have found its way into the secure-boot mechanism and enable me to
> boot in Other mode - i.e. not a Microsoft secure boot.
I tried this, yes.
> As Mick says, you need to install a kernel image in the boot partition
> (which must be FAT32). There are several ways to do this; I use bootctl from
> sys-boot/systemd-boot (don't worry - it doesn't depend on having the rest of
> systemd around it). It allows a choice of system to boot, without the
> gymnastics needed by GRUB-2, but you have to maintain the different images'
> config files manually.
I actually used the standard grub2 stuff as documented in the Gentoo
handbook.
I've managed to get the BIOS to see and boot into grub2. The critical
step which enabled this was copying grubx64.efi into
/boot/efi/boot/bootx64.efi, as hinted at by the Gentoo handbook. It
seems the Asus BIOS is one which will only recognise the boot image at
precisely that location.
Gentoo itself, of course, doesn't boot yet. Nothing is ever that
simple. In the grub2 article in the Gentoo wiki, there is a most
infuriating injunction, which could scarcely be worse, except by being
absent entirely:
"The grub-mkconfig utility does not work properly when using
software RAID. Manual configuration of the scripts in /etc/grub.d/
is necessary, as otherwise after installation, the system will be
left in a non-bootable state."
. It would have been nice if the author of that warning could have left
one or two hints about precisely needs doing. The scripts in
/etc/grub.d/ are massive (~1200 lines), and I'll probably need to read
the grub manual, which is over 7000 lines long. Come back, lilo, all is
forgiven!
Could somebody here please give me some hints about what I need to do to
these grub scripts to get my mdadm RAID-1 root partition recognised and
started by grub?
> Let me know if I can' help with bootctl. Good luck!
grub2 is a monstrosity. All I want to do is to boot Gentoo Linux, not
go through all the machinations required by grub.
I think I'll look at bootctl. It's looks far more likely to give me
what I want than grub2. Does it cope OK with mdadm RAID setups?
> * An advantage of buying a newfangled system ready built.
> --
> Regards
> Peter
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
