[solved] Lenovo T520, USB Boot fails

rgeber · Last edited by rgeber on Tue Jun 28, 2011 7:41 am; edited 1 time in total

Hi,

I've installed a luks based gentoo setup, built the ramdisk and all that kind of stuff. Goal is to boot from a USB key. The entire boot partition is on it and should work just fine. However the T520 refuses to boot from it while another board boots into grub effortless.

I'm using BIOS version 8AET34WW (1.14) on the T520 42404CG
USB UEFI Bios Support (needed for USB Boot) is on
The USB device appears in the Boot list and is on top of the list.

The USB stick in question has a msdos partition table with just one ext2 partition.

I tried it with different USB drives. It does neither boot my gentoo boot stick nor a Debian stick I'm using to boot my home fileserver on which the gentoo stick boots just fine.

What am I doing wrong? Does it have anything to do with this UEFI thing? Do I need another partition table? Did anyone experience similar problems with the T520?

cu
Roman

barul · Guru Joined: 28 May 2010 Posts: 434

How do you make your usb bootable system? Did you try it on other systems?

rgeber · Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 2:50 pm Post subject:

Yes it works on another Box. Grub comes up. This test box usually runs with Debian coming off the stick. This stick could however not boot on the Lenovo.

The gentoo stick is set p like a HDD. A simple 0% - 100% partition within a msdos label. Grub has been installed to it (at the time it was /dev/sdb or hd(1,0). Tried grub-install as well as a manual install.

cu
Roman
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rgeber · Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 4:58 pm Post subject:

educated myself a little further. Seems like I'd need grub 2 to use UEFI since "normal" booting in USB mode doesn't work on this box.

Checked the following resources so far while trying to make this work:

* http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/EFI_Native_on_Mac#Using_GRUB
* https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Detecting_UEFI_Firmware_Arch
* https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB2

However I have trouble understanding what really needs to be done. Never used Grub2 nor UEFI. Is there a more gentoo specific documentation describing how to set up this efi partition, installing bootloader and so on? Feeling a little lost

cu
Roman
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rgeber · Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 7:43 am Post subject:

solved the problem. One should not try using the USB stick like a HDD hoping for an MBR to work. All I had to do was setting the "boot" flag to make the stick bootable. Sometimes one is quite blind.

Hereby solved.

cu
Roman
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