search

ValveSoftware / SteamOS

SteamOS community tracker
1.56k stars 70 forks source link

Booting into Non-uefi ubuntu breaks SteamOS efi file #228

Open Hellreaver opened 10 years ago

Hellreaver commented 10 years ago

So, i installed steamOS, worked great. Turned computer off, unplugged drive, plugged in ubuntu. Did what i had to do, turned off, plugged in steamos hdd and unplugged ubuntu one. "please insert correct bootable device" etc.

Balderick commented 10 years ago

Sure you do not have to configure your firmware appropriately to how the os you want to boot has been installed? Installing steamos in efi mode and installing ubuntu using bios/legacy/csm mode means a need to change firmware settings appropriately for which os you want to boot. I can only suggest you read your motherboards user manual or that you install all os's in the same mode if you want to easily multi boot. Using a boot manager like refind will show all available bootable entries on system regardless of the method they use to boot. Even showing which method each bootable entry uses.

Hellreaver commented 10 years ago

No, I understand that. I have an MSI Mobo, it has dual support without chaning firmware settings, i can go back and forth w/out changing anything because i have both uefi and legacy support enabled.

Hellreaver commented 10 years ago

And i actually use grub2, which i prefer over refind

Balderick commented 10 years ago

I wonder if your steamos hard drive is being assigned a new guid due to it being disconnected from system?

Hellreaver commented 10 years ago

How can i check this?

On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Balderick notifications@github.com wrote:

I wonder if your hard drive is being assigned a new uuid due to it being disconnected from system?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/228#issuecomment-56281659 .

Balderick commented 10 years ago

you could mount drive on another machine to prove you do have an efi entry in ESP this may show that if there is an efi entry in ESP and your machine is not using it then either your firmware settings are not appropriately configured or you need to assign new guid by making a new efi entry. chrooting and reinstalling grub-efi is possibly one workaround. not sure how you can do that with steamos having no live media and am guessing any distro live media would do. reinstall is other option - hopefully you set seperate root partition to save you redownloading all your steamapps or have a backup.

directhex commented 9 years ago

Despite it being offered as an option in most firmwares, UEFI does not support both UEFI and BIOS boot on the same system.

Your problem is that with UEFI, every installed OS registers itself with the firmware as a bootable option (ie "steamos" is listed as a bootable drive in your boot drive menu) - and some firmwares will get rid of broken entries periodically. If you disconnect the drive which the steamos entry points to, it may be forgetting about your steamos entry.

You may be able to work around it by renaming (or copying) the boot loader on the drive to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi instead of /efi/boot/grubx64.efi - the former is treated as a default fallback boot location on most firmwares & should boot even if the entry is missing