UEFI Migrate to new hard drive

[Richard Shaw]

I bought an SSD to replace my HDD and I used System Rescue CD to move my
EFI and boot partitions over and then used lvm tools to add the new drive
to the lvm and then remove the old one.

So all of my data is over on the new driver... but I can't boot it...

I've looked at efibootmgr and it still has an entry for Fedora, the
partition looks correct and per efibootmgr the loader name looks good...

But no matter what I do it won't boot.

So I figured it out...

Somehow the PARTUUID did change... And using system rescue CD the efivars
was mounted read only so even though efibootmgr didn't complain, it wasn't
actually changing anything.

I had to:

efibootmgr -B 0001 (which was the fedora entry)
and then
efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l "EFI/fedora/shim.efi" -L Fedora

then it worked...

NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS INTUITIVE!

Thanks,
Richard

[Łukasz Posadowski]

Data Sun, 10 Feb 2019 15:20:17 -0600
Richard Shaw  napisał(a):
> I bought an SSD to replace my HDD and I used System Rescue CD to move
> my EFI and boot partitions over and then used lvm tools to add the
> new drive to the lvm and then remove the old one.
>
> So all of my data is over on the new driver... but I can't boot it...
>
> I've looked at efibootmgr and it still has an entry for Fedora, the
> partition looks correct and per efibootmgr the loader name looks
> good...
>
> But no matter what I do it won't boot.
>
> So I figured it out...
>
> Somehow the PARTUUID did change... And using system rescue CD the
> efivars was mounted read only so even though efibootmgr didn't
> complain, it wasn't actually changing anything.
>
> I had to:
>
> efibootmgr -B 0001 (which was the fedora entry)
> and then
> efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l "EFI/fedora/shim.efi" -L Fedora
>
> then it worked...
>
> NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS INTUITIVE!

Thanks. I have similar problems with Samsung 530U when changing distro.
I removed the drive from Samsung, plugged to another computer trough
usb/sata adapter and wiped it clean. I can't even boot from Rescue CD
if UEFI has valid xyz distro entries and appropriate partitions on disk.

I will try efibootmgr to solve it next time.

[Samuel Sieb]

On 2/10/19 10:35 PM, Łukasz Posadowski wrote:
> Thanks. I have similar problems with Samsung 530U when changing distro.
> I removed the drive from Samsung, plugged to another computer trough
> usb/sata adapter and wiped it clean. I can't even boot from Rescue CD
> if UEFI has valid xyz distro entries and appropriate partitions on disk.

I don't know what the boot menu key is on a Samsumg, but there should be 
one.  Maybe check in the BIOS to see if the boot menu is enabled.  There 
is a wide variety of keys that I've seen.  ESC, F2, F9, F12.

[Richard Shaw]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 12:36 AM Łukasz Posadowski 
wrote:
> Data Sun, 10 Feb 2019 15:20:17 -0600
> Richard Shaw  napisał(a):
> > I bought an SSD to replace my HDD and I used System Rescue CD to move
> > my EFI and boot partitions over and then used lvm tools to add the
> > new drive to the lvm and then remove the old one.
> >
> > So all of my data is over on the new driver... but I can't boot it...
> >
> > I've looked at efibootmgr and it still has an entry for Fedora, the
> > partition looks correct and per efibootmgr the loader name looks
> > good...
> >
> > But no matter what I do it won't boot.
> >
> > So I figured it out...
> >
> > Somehow the PARTUUID did change... And using system rescue CD the
> > efivars was mounted read only so even though efibootmgr didn't
> > complain, it wasn't actually changing anything.
> >
> > I had to:
> >
> > efibootmgr -B 0001 (which was the fedora entry)
> > and then
> > efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l "EFI/fedora/shim.efi" -L Fedora
> >
> > then it worked...
> >
> > NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS INTUITIVE!
>
> Thanks. I have similar problems with Samsung 530U when changing distro.
> I removed the drive from Samsung, plugged to another computer trough
> usb/sata adapter and wiped it clean. I can't even boot from Rescue CD
> if UEFI has valid xyz distro entries and appropriate partitions on disk.
>
> I will try efibootmgr to solve it next time.

I forgot to mention I had to do a remount of efivars so it could get
updated.

efibootmgr is not good about letting you know. It just silently looks like
it completes.

Thanks,
Richard
> --
> Łukasz Posadowski
> _______________________________________________
> users mailing list -- [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [e-mail]
> Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html
> List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
> List Archives:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 2:21 PM Richard Shaw  wrote:
> efibootmgr -B 0001 (which was the fedora entry)
> and then
> efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l "EFI/fedora/shim.efi" -L Fedora
>
> then it worked...
>
> NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS INTUITIVE!

It's not intuitive, it's also not self-describing. But there is a
(massive) spec that describes the intended behavior. The end result
is, with UEFI comes with a stick, and with BIOS you're left on your
own to learn you need a stick and then find it.

Anyway, another option is you can remove all the boot entries (for
operating systems, you can leave device entries). The spec defines
that if none of the NVRAM boot entries point to a bootable system,
then the firmware starts looking on the ESP (there are rules for the
order of ESP checking), for a BOOT directory, and blindly executes the
BOOT<arch>.EFI found there. On x86_64, the BOOTX64.EFI is actually
shim.efi which has the ability along with fallback.efi to add the
proper Fedora entry to NVRAM if one doesn't exist already.

[Richard Shaw]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 6:19 PM Chris Murphy 
wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 2:21 PM Richard Shaw  wrote:
> > efibootmgr -B 0001 (which was the fedora entry)
> > and then
> > efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l "EFI/fedora/shim.efi" -L Fedora
> >
> > then it worked...
> >
> > NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS INTUITIVE!
>
> It's not intuitive, it's also not self-describing. But there is a
> (massive) spec that describes the intended behavior. The end result
> is, with UEFI comes with a stick, and with BIOS you're left on your
> own to learn you need a stick and then find it.

Well, I was pretty frustrated at that point :) But there are some things
that would make it easier...

For one, why did my PARTUUID change? I used gparted and moved both /boot
and /boot/efi over to the new disk. The UUID was unchanged, and I had no
idea that EFI used PARTUUID.

Also, why does efibootmgr silently act like it's working? I tried
"changing" an entry and it exited like it worked but couldn't because
efivars was still mounted RO... I can't remember what I did but a different
command (maybe remove?) was the one that got me the hint that I needed to
remount efivars as RW.

Thirdly... I wasn't sure if partitions in EFI start with 0 or 1 and it I
couldn't find ANYWHERE that said one way or the other...

Thanks,
Richard