Reinstalling the bootloader

[Chris Murphy]

On Apr 9, 2014, at 12:59 PM, Andrew Lutomirski <luto at mit.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>> 
>> You need to install or reinstall grub2-efi and shim packages.
> 
> Aha, a correct answer!  Thanks!  Based on this hint, I think I figured
> it out.  I updated the
> wiki accordingly.
> 
> Can you take a quick look at:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GRUB_2#Updating_GRUB_2_configuration_on_UEFI_systems

Create a boot menu entry can be skipped if it's not a dual boot system. /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT contains shim.efi as bootx64.efi which is run by default on a system without an NVRAM entry already pointing to shim or grub, and a fallback entry is created automagically. With Windows, yeah you probably have to do something manually because it probably always boots Windows otherwise.



>>> It's currently mostly working, modulo the efibootbgr issue.  But I
>>> don't actually know what to type into efibootmgr to fix it, the OOPS
>>> notwithstanding.  I can probably figure it out once the OOPS is fixed.
>> 
>> Strictly speaking you don't need to point  UEFI non-Secure Boot computer to shim.efi, you can just leave it alone and put a grub.cfg in the proper place. At the grub prompt if you type set you should see either config_directory= and prefix= to show where it's looking for the grub.cfg.
> 
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73761
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1085957

I'm not familiar with this usage: efibootmgr -B -b 0

If 0 is the same as 0000 then that seems to ask for the removal of a fixed entry: the DVD in CSM-BIOS mode (?) which I wouldn't expect to work, ever. But then it also shouldn't crash the kernel.

A valid command would be efibootmgr -b 0003 -B



> 
>> 
>>> or, even better, if anaconda's bootloader
>>> installation process were factored out into a command I could run.
>> 
>> I don't understand what this means.
> 
> Being able to do:
> 
> $ sudo fedora-configure-bootloader
> 
> would be awesome.  It would probably have to take some command line arguments.

Something that properly deals with restoring shim, grub, grub.cfg, and NVRAM would be nice. But the NVRAM part might be a rat hole, seeing as some of the manufacturer NVRAM behaviors are pretty icky. And on top of that don't seem to have a good way for users to reset/wipe it. It's something I think the UEFI Forum ought to put in the standard and require it.


Chris Murphy