On Sunday, 10 July 2022 17:37:00 BST Michael wrote: > This is happening if the EFI firmware for some reason has re-scanned the > attached block devices to find bootable UEFI images. I've seen something as > simple as rebooting with, then without a bootable USB drive causing this. > Since the images boot order is editable, in your case via bootctl, then it > should be a fixable problem.
But, as I said, the order is unchanged, yet the BIOS displays them in reverse order. I think the BIOS is not long for this world, as you will see... This machine shows bizarre behaviour in booting as well. Often, as soon as the POST is finished and the BIOS asks which kernel image to hand over to, I have no keyboard or mouse - except for CTRL-ALT-DEL, which does reboot. The thing that got me exercised today was Gentoo complaining that it couldn't mount /boot - wrong FS type or...etc. So I had to do something. So today (well, yesterday now) I told the BIOS to load its standard optimised defaults, then rebooted, then told it to load my tuned set and rebooted again. Then I booted a SystemRescueCD (because the USB version showed that same no- keyboard problem), formatted /boot with FAT32, zapped / then recovered a week- old backup. Then, still in RescCD, a sync and world-update brought the system back. Even then, running bootctl remove; bootctl install; replace /boot/loader/ loader.conf; bootctl update - still left no UEFI boot option for the Gentoo system, though it usually does create one. I had to use efibootmgr to create a boot option, then do the bootctl dance again. Finally, a bootable, running system. Oh, one other thing. This machine has a small unformatted partition before / boot, and gparted on the rescue CD showed me that it had lost its bios_grub flag. Could that account for the wrong FS type error? Should I consider re-flashing the BIOS? It's getting on for 10 years old. I did that to another machine once, thereby killing it stone dead. -- Regards, Peter.
