bug 1006304 - Re: Many attempts to install f20 today

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 12/31/2013 04:46 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Dec 31, 2013, at 1:25 PM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com> wrote:
>> You got them.  let me know if anything else is needed to get this working.  It takes ~ 2hrs to do a test.
> I don't see any kernel configs for EFI that aren't already enabled in config. And there isn't a debug option for _EFI_VARS so I don't know how we get more info when the kernel fails to make NVRAM changes.
>
> Macs have had a long history of using PRAM/NVRAM with a ritualistic keyboard command on boot used to perform the voodoo incantation of "zapping the PRAM" to clear all entries. Since HFS+ has a volume header that includes a pointer to the bootloader, that is used as a fallback when NVRAM is empty.
>
> If Fedora is the only installed system, we have BOOTX64.efi and fallback.efi which possibly sort out what happens if NVRAM is cleared. I don't know about multiboot with Windows or other Linux distros, whether Microsoft puts a BOOTX64.efi there, and whether Fedora replaces it.

This is a Lenovo x120e duo core that I have had for a year; 
reconditioned.  Nothing on my drives except Fedora.  Had f17 x86_64 
previously; jumping a few releases.  There MAY be some hardware problems 
to shake out.  I was having problems writing to USB sticks before, but 
those have gone away since getting f20 i386 working. Speaker is a 
problem.  It starts working at boot, but soon stops.  I added the 
.asoundrc file, but that did not seem to make a difference.