swapping disk with UEFI hardware - a dead end?

[Chris Murphy]

On Jun 28, 2012, at 8:08 AM, Kamil Paral wrote:
> 
> Do we have a Fedora page documenting boot problems somewhere (re-installing GRUB and stuff)? It would be useful to add a short help in there about UEFI too. GRUB guides are all over the Internet, but UEFI is a new stuff and I wasn't able to google anything at all about this problem.

On Linux, there are, in effect, four GRUBs. GRUB legacy, GRUB legacy EFI, GRUB 2, and GRUB 2 EFI. And all four are fundamentally different in the context of your question. I think any boot troubleshooting guide needs to be specific to each of these use cases, rather than being documented together. Documented together would be an example of user hostile documentation, not just a user hostile boot loading experience, because anyone needing a troubleshooting guide doesn't need to wade through 3/4 of the material that's inapplicable to their case.

Since GRUB legacy EFI is a Red Hat thing, not available upstream, but is what's being used in F17, it's unlikely you're going to find much useful information online about it. I certainly haven't. My (still limited) understanding of its idiosyncrasies comes from pain and misery due to direct contact. GRUB2 EFI has the potential to be an even more painful experience due to idiosyncrasies with various UEFI implementations. 

I am speaking from a troubleshooting perspective, i.e., once boot loading has gone off the rails, it is a truly obnoxious experience from what I'm used to in the Apple hardware world. There, the fallback just works, doesn't matter what the OS is, and it requires no UI.

Chris Murphy