[SOLVED] Can't boot Mint into UEFI mode.

[Dalhai]

Solution

Bootable USB stick worked for me :') That was one I did not try -.-

Original Text

Hi guys,

About four months ago I started a thread in this forum regarding a dual - boot system with Gigabyte Hybrid EFI.
Now I have issues with UEFI again. Let me explain:

My new mainboard is an ASUS Sabertooth Z77. It uses the ASUS UEFI BIOS utilities. Installing and booting windows in UEFI mode is no problem, in the boot menu an option is available which looks like this: UEFI: <Device>. The windows installer created the efi partition, the system reserved partition for windows and the actual windows partition which is fine.

However, when inserting the Linux Mint DVD (I burned it 3 times by now, once in the slowest possible speed with verification, once in the slowest possible speed without verification and once in normal speed with verification), the UEFI does not recognize it as UEFI bootable. There simply is no "UEFI: <DVD - XYZ>" entry in the boot menu with the mint dvd inserted.
With the Win7 DVD inserted the entry is there. Also, booting into the efi shell and displaying all EFI mapings, I see both the EFI partition plus the optical drive when the Win7 DVD is inserted, but not when the Mint DVD is inserted. So no manual booting like that from the EFI shell.

Is there anything I can try to make it work?

Note that i've seen this thread. My prolem is NOT that my UEFI install does not start (I might come to that problem later ). My problem is, that I can't get a device booted into UEFI mode.

Images:
With Windows 7 Inserted it looks like this:
Boot menu
EFI Shell

With Linux Mint 13 DVD inserted:
Boot menu
EFI Shell
lsing blk3 and fs0

General settings:
Current SATA settings
Boot settings
General BIOS information

I really hope someone has an idea

Moving ODD from SATA II to SATA III connector
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-922652-start-0.html

Did not solve it for me.

rEFInd:
rEFInd did not help by now. It does find:
- Microsoft EFI
- Shexll64.efi
- refind_64.efi
- BOOTX64.EFI // Which is windows

It did not, however, find my optical drive.

[srs5694]

There are several possibilities, but they fall into two broad categories:

• Install Mint in BIOS mode and then switch to EFI-mode booting once the installation is complete.
• Find a way to convince the system to boot the disc in EFI mode.

The first option is fairly straightforward if your firmware provides a way to switch between BIOS-mode and EFI-mode booting from the optical disc. Be sure to create a BIOS Boot Partition to make GRUB happy. The system might not boot Linux after installation is complete, but using something like Super GRUB 2 Disk should get it started. At that point, you should edit /etc/fstab to add an entry for your EFI System Partition (ESP), which should normally mount at /boot/efi. You can then uninstall grub-pc and install grub-efi. With any luck you'll then be able to use your firmware to select GRUB and boot in EFI mode; however, there may be some additional hoops to jump through.

For the second option, there may be firmware options to get the optical disc to boot, but different EFI implementations vary so much that I can't provide any specific recommendations. If you can't find a firmware option, one possibility is to install my rEFInd boot manager along with its ISO-9660 driver. (Note that the driver is not installed by default.) When you reboot with the Mint disc in the drive, you should then see an option to start the Mint installer. If not, wait for the drive to spin up and hit the Esc key to refresh the display. With any luck this will get the system up and running a little more directly, and on subsequent boots you should see an entry for Mint in the rEFInd boot menu.

[srs5694]

Actually, it's just occurred to me: Be sure you're trying to install a 64-bit version of Mint. Few if any Linux distributions support EFI boots on their 32-bit variants, and even if they did, you'd lose some EFI-related functionality booting a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit EFI system.

[Dalhai]

I'm 100% sure it's an x64 version. Triple checked that when it didn't work the first time.
Looking at rEFInd now. I hope I will get it working sooner or later. It's getting really frustrating

Thanks for the advice so far!

Update:
rEFInd found four entires: Microsoft EFI, Shellx64.efi, refind_64.efi (my brain ... sry if i got this wrong), BOOTX64.EFI (which i suspect to be the same as "Microsoft EFI").
It did not find my optical drive (I pressed escape, it refreshes, no new entry).

I think I did something wrong tough.

Edit:
rEFInd does not find the optical drive. I used iso9660_x64.efi as driver (since I was not sure I did something wrong, I explicitly loaded it in EFI shell).
Might be a very very silly question, but could it be that the mint dvd is not found because it has an /efi directory while all working devices do have an /EFI directory?
So, could it be a naming issue with my ASUS UEFI BIOS?

Next:
I'll try booting in BIOS mode and then switching to UEFI mode as proposed by rs.

[Dalhai]

Might be worth noting that I do not have any problems booting the linux distributions i've tried so far in BIOS mode.
Also, windows 64 bit is correctly detected as UEFI - Bootable, so I guess my optical drive is not the problem?
However, if it is not, what IS the problem actually? Does the firmware just not "look" into the DVD recursively as soon as it did not find an *.efi file in the root directory (such as on the Win7 DVD)?

[srs5694]

Did you mistakenly mark this as "solved?" It appears with a "solved" tag in the thread listing, but it doesn't sound like you've solved the problem.

In any event, booting optical discs in EFI mode is a disaster; the EFI spec relies on El Torito, which adds an unnecessary layer of complexity compared to simply using an ISO-9660 driver and files in the ISO-9660 filesystem. This makes it harder to build bootable ISO-9660 discs, and creates all sorts of opportunities for things to go wrong. My suggestion to use rEFInd was, in part, an attempt to work around the possibility of an El Torito problem by enabling you to boot from the files on the ISO-9660 filesystem, which I know are present (at least, in the LM13 disc image I've downloaded but not yet installed).

A case problem is indeed a possibility, but not a likely one. I know of one EFI implementation (Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI) that has a case bug that might cause such problems, but you say you're using an ASUS board, so it's unlikely this is the cause. Rather, my suspicion is that the ISO-9660 driver isn't being loaded or that there's some sort of problem with it accessing your optical disc. You can investigate this further with the help of an EFI shell program, but it might be better to try another approach first....

If you care to pursue the EFI option further at this point, I suggest copying all the files from the CD-R onto a FAT filesystem on a USB flash drive. (Perhaps just the EFI/boot directory will work.) You can then try with rEFInd again. With luck, it'll pick up the installer, which will boot and let you install from either the USB flash drive or the optical disc.

[Dalhai]

The problem that I can't boot linux mint into UEFI mode is solved. I forgot to try a bootable USB stick, which worked like a charm.
I updated the entry post with my progress.

Oh and btw. I switched to the ASUS board from a Gigabyte GA-P67-UD7-B3 which has a Hybrid - EFI. You gave me advice about it in this thread, remember?
I read through your articles like 100 times, but no matter what I did, it just would not work and since now I'm running out of time, I switched.

I can, however, remove the [SOLVED] if you tell me I should, since the problem with the optical drive is not solved in general.
I'm writing this from my UEFI linux mint right now <3

Works without any problems now. I'm trying to remove the duplicate and unneeded entries from rEFInd right now
rEFInd is showing me rEFInd itself, the EFIShell (for which you added a button) and the Windows boot twice (once with the windows icon, the second time just as the generic icon).
Still trying to figure out how to hide them. I might have done something wrong in the refind.conf. And I can't just rename Shellx64.efi or BOOTX64.efi to something else.

Oh, doesn't seem to work... well i'll leave it as - is.

[srs5694]

I'm glad you've gotten it to work.

As to the duplicate rEFInd boot menu entries I have a few suggestions:

• Check the "scanfor" line in refind.conf. You might have duplicates because you've told rEFInd to scan for BIOS boot loaders via the "hdbios", "biosexternal", or "cd" options. Since you're presumably booting exclusively via EFI mode, there's no point to including such entries.
• Check for duplicate .efi (or .EFI) files on the ESP (in /boot/efi under Linux). Try typing 'find /boot/efi -iname "*.efi"' to find all the .efi files on the ESP, then delete or rename the ones you suspect are duplicates.
• If rEFInd is showing its own binary file (the one from which it launched, rather than a duplicate), then that's a bug. In fact, I've had multiple bugs with the same symptom appear again and again through rEFInd's development. If you're not running the latest version (0.4.1 as I type this), then you should upgrade. If you're running the latest version, then you could e-mail me and I can send you a version with debugging code enabled to help track down the source of the problem.

[jkw]

I seriously can't install LinuxMint on my new upgrade with contains Asus Sabertooth Z77.
I made a post here: viewtopic.php?f=46&t=105815&p=597160&hilit=asus+sabertooth+z77#p597160
Still have not figured out how to install it. I got a USB-stick with mint 13 cinnamon 64bit on, but it simply refuses to work.
The menu appears, I choose to start LinuxMint.
I get a black screen with a white square in the topleft corner, then the computer freezes. Reset button doesn't respond, I have to hold power-button for 3 secs.
Starting to get really frustrated here...