Install without CD?

[laprjns]

Well, it 300Mb and formatted as VFat, coded EF00, but the ESP on the Asus hard drive had nothing to do with my problem booting Slackware/Salix/Slackel iso flashed to a USB stick, On the Asus, the uefi firmware recognizes that the USB Stick is ufi bootable, but when I select it to boot from the uefi menu, Grub starts, but most of the time I just get the grub prompt instead of a grub menu where I can launch into the installer. Yet I take the USB stick out of the Asus and insert it into my desktop and I get a grub menu without fail and it comes up quick. Also I have dd'ed a copy of fedora iso on the same stick and it boot up without any problem on my Asus Laptop.

[westms]

Both of my computers, a Desktop with an MSI motherboard and a Asus Laptop, boot in UEFI mode only; no CMS or legacy boot modes are enable in either.

This is true for firmware, which upholds always strictly the native UEFI mode. But you can not know this. Because not every UEFI firmware keeps the once set native UEFI mode strictly and always. There are exceptions. Some firmware does not keep the set native mode and alternates between Native and CSM mode back and forth. One can not tell which mode is in progress. Other firmware, in turn, holds a the actual native mode, but changes as needed, between UEFI drivers and BIOS drivers. One can not recognize what type of driver is just in use.

In fact, they both boot into the rEFInd boot manager which detects and presents boot menu items for all the installed Operating Systems, including Window 10,along with detecting bootable removable devices.

I'm confused - you never told before about using an alternative boot manager.

In a previous message you wrote:

I have an Asus laptop which refuses to boot any USB memory stick that I have that has been dd 'ed with any Slackware derivative iso, including Salix and Slackel, yet they boot fine on my Desktop with a uefi MSI motherboard. On the Asus they just boot up to a grub prompt.

But now you write:

It's booting the removable devices where the Asus laptop has problems with some of the Slackware derivatives that were dd'ed onto USB sticks.

This "some of the Slackware derivatives" differs from the previous statement. So at least you can boot one of the Slackware-based ISO images on the laptop? Am I right? Because this would give me an idea. The Salix-Grub2 and also the Slackware-Grub2 are built without the ./configure parameter "--with-platform=efi". But maybe this Grub2 from the bootable ISO image is built with this switch. If so, the grub-mkimage commands (within make-grub.sh) built different Grub2 boot environments. The Salix ISO image has no grubx64.efi, I've checked it. Grub2 boot environments for Salix and Slackware might are insufficient for booting ISO images from a flash memory stick. Does this bootable Slackware derivative ISO image in question has a grubx64.efi in ./EFI/BOOT ? Does the Fedora ISO image has a grubx64.efi ? It need not necessarily be in ./EFI/BOOT, may lie elsewhere. The Ubuntu ISO image is bootable on your laptop. It has a grubx64.efi in ./EFI/BOOT , I've checked it too.

Why it works on the desktop? My first paragraph above would explain it.

Maybe you can create a new GRUB 2 and thereby use the parameter "--with-platform=efi". Then create a new ISO image for testing purposes. This is certainly a lot of work, but would allow a clear statement.

Do you know this?:
http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:slackw ... d_hardware

So yes, you are correct, it does boot into the grub boot manager, however on the Asus Laptop there is no grub boot menu presented. After about a minute or so just the grub prompt appears, and hence there is no boot options to select and then no kernel and file system to boot. And yet I put the very same usb stick with the dd'ed iso into my MSI desktop and the grub menu comes up almost instantaneously and I can then select and boot into a kernel and root file system.

The Grub prompt might be the GRUB Rescue Shell. Are you able to enter commands at this prompt? "ls", "set", "unset" and "insmod" should be possible. With "ls" you'll see the next boot step and with "set" you can direct the Grub2 loader to the path. The normal boot process, but manually:

Code: Select all

set prefix=(hdx,y)/boot/grub  # or /efi/boot/grub or something other
insmod normal                 # to load normal.mod into the kernel
normal

If indeed once a grub2 boot menu and another time a boot prompt appears, which can also be due to the logic for locating the boot loader (some heuristic is applied). The result of the previous boot is included in the next, as stored in NVRAM.

If you read Rod Smiths excellent web-pages on UEFI [...]

I started with "Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux" http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html and then read all the other articles.

Also worth reading:
Broken UEFI implementations http://wiki.osdev.org/Broken_UEFI_implementations

UEFI boot: how does that actually work, then?, AdamW on Linux and more, by Adam Williamson https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/2 ... work-then/

grub-install will install a misconfigured EFI image on removable media when /boot is also on the removable media, bug report by Craig G on 2013-06-06 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1188364

GRUB, OSDev.org http://wiki.osdev.org/GRUB#Build_Grub_E ... x64.efi.29

[laprjns]

Thanks, westems, I appreciate you taking the time to help, but we are obviously not communicating.