UEFI and elillo config

[tim_c]

I am struggling to get elillo to work on UEFI and GPT on a 64 bit system.

Via the BIOS I can boot either W8.1 or Salix.

elillo installed but the installed ignored being told about W. partitions, only having an entry for Salix.

I have completely failed to find any documentation explicit on the contents of say elillo.conf if that is how it is edited.

'ow do I give it the boot?

[laprjns]

elilo is both a boot loader and boot manager (i.e multiboot) . As a boot manager it has limited capabilities and one of them is that it is not able to boot Windows partitions. Its inclusion in Slackware and therefore Salix is primary as a boot loader and was not intended to be used as a boot manager. There are other boot manager such as grub and rEFInd (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/) that can be install which will provide muliboot capabilities including booting Windows OS.

However all EFI firmware (what you called BIOS) already have a boot manger as part of the firmware and include a rudimentary boot menu which can be call up at system power up. The trick is getting the UEFI menu to appear at the beginning of the system start up. With all uefi systems that I am familiar with, you need to press a key immediately after powering up the system. Unfortunately different manufactures use different keys. On my Asus laptop I need to press the ESC key to bring up the UEFI boot menu. On my Dell laptop it's F12 and on my desktop with a MSI motherboard it's F11. You need to check your motherboards documentation to see which key it uses to access the uefi menu. Once you know the correct key, then all you need to do is press the power up button and immediately press the uefi menu key. I usually press it repeatedly until the menu comes up. Once it up you should see menu entries to boot Windows, and Salix, and possible a couple of others.

Under normal situation, when you do not press the uefi menu key, the system will boot into the default OS which usually is the last OS that was booted. This can be changed by going into UEFI Setup (kind of like the BIOS menues), which is usually one of the other boot option presented at the UEFI menu. Like the BIOS menus on legacy systems, UFI Setup menus differ from manufacture to manufacture so I cannot tell you how to change it on your system, but most likely you will find it under the Boot menu.

Another way to change the default boot OS and things like the order that boot option appear in the UEFI menu is to use efibootmgr (http://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr) from the command line in Salix. This is what the Salix installer used to set up elilo and create the Salix boot option in the UEFI menu.

[tim_c]

Thanks laprjns, so it is not so simple.

After doing umpteen installs trying different combinations I had to settle on uefi mode as the only one where both os would install sanely. even though the chaining made no sense. It's the missus' pc where occasionally the dual boot is wanted. I'll dig out the m/b documentation later. Press a key will probably do but remember the last boot will not.

Workaround for now and wait for a solid solution to appear. I'll read up some more.

[laprjns]

Workaround for now and wait for a solid solution to appear. I'll read up some more.

Here's the solution that I'm currently using
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

[knome]

+1 for rEFInd.

@ tim_c... If you haven't already discovered it's useful to mount your EFI system partition so you can read the elilo.conf and possibly your Windows boot loader.

Assuming dev/sda1 is your ESP...

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sudo mkdir /boot/efi
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi

I've bunged it in my fstab for convenience.

[djemos]

I do not know if this is going here. I don't have a dual uefi salix and windows 8 system to check it.
Note. Only experience users do this. So do it at your own risk.

From your running salix system.
type

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sudo ls -l /boot/efi

remove all elilo stuff from /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware-14.1
Slackware-14.1 might be salix

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rm -rf /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware-14.1

Slackware-14.1 might be salix

download and install grub

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sudo slapt-get -i grub

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sudo grub-install /dev/sda

check if grub installed correctly

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ls -l /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware-14.1/grubx64.efi

run grub-mkconfig

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sudo mkdir /boot/grub

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sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

same can be done running update-grub

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sudo /usr/sbin/update-grub

if you get a message about "Windows boot Manager is not yet supported by grub-mkconfig"
Then do it manually.

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sudo geany /boot/grub/grub.cfg

go after line ##end /etc/grub.d/30_os prober"
and add these lines
menuentry "Microsoft Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 UEFI-GPT" {
set root='hd0,gpt2'
chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
boot
}

test booting into salix

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sudo reboot 

then reboot again and boot into windows