Well, that was a bust. I accidentally didn't just format the EFI
partition, but deleted it. So I re-created it with the help of disks and
gparted (to leave the first 3 MB empty, I remeber that being a fix added
kinda recently to combat bad BIOS/EFI implementations, since Windows is
doing the same and nobody could come up with anything better.
Anyways, after installing rEFInd with no grub present, it would boot
into rEFInd, but that's it. No boot options, nothing under F2. Also, I
couldn't find anything helpful on the Arch Wiki page for this. In
theory, it should be as simple as refind-install. So the only reason I
could guess to be the reason would be that rEFInd might not be capable
of handling LUKS, which would be quite disappointing. Maybe I'll take a
look at systemd-boot in the next days, as I don't need any customization
anyways, and maybe it can handle encryption (or better decryption)
better than Grub — especially with LUKS2 grub seems a bit unreasonably slow.
On 04.01.24 11:56, Richard Rosner wrote:
Good to know that it should be possible. But as mentioned, these
symbols only offer me to boot from grub or fwupd. F2 also doesn't show
that much more, it merely gives me the option to boot into the BIOS
settings. Maybe I'll have to completely purge all Grub packages, wipe
the existing EFI partition and then try to install rEFInd. I'll have
to check.
On Thu, Jan 4, 2024, 09:29 Joel Roth <jo...@pobox.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 08:23:29PM +0100, Richard Rosner wrote:
> So, since for whatever reason Grub seems to be broken beyond
repair, I today
> tried to just replace it with rEFInd. Installation succeeded
without any
> trouble. But when I start my system, rEFInd just asks me if I
want to boot
> with fwupd or with the still very broken Grub. Am I missing
something? Is
> rEFInd really just something to select between different OSs
(and not just
> different distributions like Grub can very well do) and then
gives the rest
> over to their bootloaders or am I missing something so rEFInd
will take over
> all of Grubs jobs?
I boot my debian-based system with rEFInd. Grub is not
present. A couple big icons show on the boot screen. The
small print at the bottom mentions hit F2 for more options.
On my system, F2 offers a selection among all kernels
present.
rEFInd installs into EFI/refind/ in the EFI partition.
I originally encountered it looking for something to
boot debian on a Intel Mac. It's been trouble-free.
> On 01.01.24 21:45, Richard Rosner wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 01.01.24 21:20, Richard Rosner wrote:
> > >
> > > On 01.01.24 20:30, David Wright wrote:
> > > > On Mon 01 Jan 2024 at 19:04:20 (+0100), Richard Rosner wrote:
> > > > > On 01.01.24 18:13, David Wright wrote:
> > > > > I can boot by hand, but since this is all archived
anyways and it's
> > > > > uneccessarily difficult to find some sort of guide how
to even do
> > > > > this, it might as well be a documentation for users
having such
> > > > > troubles in the future.
> > > > >
> > > > > Also, besides the way that I have no clue how it would
have to look
> > > > > like to set up a paragraph in the grub.cfg, I simply
don't see
> > > > > anything wrong with it anyways. So I can't even look at
the grub
> > > > > settings files grub.cfg is being generated from to check
where the
> > > > > error lies.
> > > > You append the commands that you used to boot manually
with into
> > > > /etc/grub.d/40_custom, observing the comments there, and
also into
> > > > grub.cfg itself at the appropriate place (near the
bottom). The
> > > > former is so that Grub includes it in any new grub.cfg
that you
> > > > create.
> > > Good to know.
> > Edit:, never mind. Tried that, it still booted straight to the
UEFI BIOS
> > menu after entering my password. At this point, I'm seriously
> > considering slapping rEFInd on it and pray that it picks up on
> > everything automatically and fix the situation. But so should
Grub have,
> > besides the fact that I can't even be entirely sure Grub is to
blame and
> > not something else.
--
Joel Roth
