[solved]Struggling with EFI can't efibootmgr the Gentoo entr

[o'bogamol]

Thanks in advance for your help.

Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 11e (the windows version, not the chromebook) The BIOS, does have EFI options in it, so this should be compatible.

the new kernel is compiled with EFI stub support

[khayyam]

o'bogamol ...

you didn't mention which boot disk, I'll asume gentoo minimal as this doesn't support efibooting ... and so efivars. I suggest you use sysresccd or some other efi capable boot disk.

best ... khay

[o'bogamol]

yep. Minimal disk. Would gentoo admin work? I'd be a lot more comfortable with something gentoo-centric, at the moment.
_________________
"History began on July 4,1776. Everything before that was a mistake." -Ron Swanson

[Buffoon]

You need to boot in EFI mode, otherwise efivars won't work. It has nothing to do with Gentoo, any Linux media with EFI boot will do.

[khayyam]

[o'bogamol]

Thanks, guys. I'll try that today and let you know how it went.
_________________
"History began on July 4,1776. Everything before that was a mistake." -Ron Swanson

[jonathan183]

systemrescuecd has worked for machines I have tried to boot except one laptop ... and I managed to boot that using the latest Gentoo live DVD - so in my experience it's worth having both

[o'bogamol]

I was able to successfully get an entry into the EFI. However it won't boot up, yet. I really like that systemrescuecd. That works nicely.

/dev/sda1 is /boot/efi (fat32) (this should not be in fstab, should it?)
/dev/sda2 is /boot (ext2)
/dev/sda3 is swap
/dev/sda4 is empty space that might end up as Win 10 or something else. Not sure yet, but that's down the road. (currently formated ntfs and zeroed out, but should not be visible, since it's not in fstab)
/dev/sda5 is / (ext4)

here is wgetpaste /etc/fstab

I used a manual kernel (not genkernel) wgetpaste /usr/src/linux/.config. As far as I can tell, all the file systems I use are compiled into the kernel, not as modules. The efi stub stuff is selected as well.
_________________
"History began on July 4,1776. Everything before that was a mistake." -Ron Swanson

[v_andal]

Really, so far I've tried to use efivars on 3 or 4 PCs with EFI boot and none of them worked. The entries are added to EFI (I can see them in efibootmgr), but any attempt to change the boot order is ignored. I mean, efiboomgr reports that the order was changed, but when I boot, the system still uses the old order, so old entry is booted and efibootmgr shows that the boot order was restored to original one.

So far I've worked around this issue by replacing old loader with mine. In case of Windows this leaves possibility that Windows would replace it back during some update, so I keep the backup at hand

I suspect, that the issue with boot order is somehow connected with the BIOS setting of boot order (DVD => Hard Disk etc) but so far I couldn't find any way to overcome it. So, maybe you have the same issue.

[o'bogamol]

I actually just figured out that part. The problem was that I misunderstood the handbook and had my boot partition formatted incorrectly. Now dev/sda2 is formatted Fat 32 and contains /boot and /boot/efi

Now I am able to boot up but it hangs at a kernel panic. Better than before. Now at least it's telling me it's broken.

Kernel panic says it can't load root block(0,0)
_________________
"History began on July 4,1776. Everything before that was a mistake." -Ron Swanson

[chithanh]

This message usually means that your kernel doesn't have the correct driver for your storage controller or root filesystem.

If you have an NVMe SSD, you need to enable CONFIG_BLK_DEV_NVME. Running "lspci -k" from a LiveCD should tell you which drivers are needed.