UEFI is a POS

[Gary Kline]

Gents,

note that I'm still having a bit of trouble with "mutt-under-fedora."
Not intended as a joke or smiley, but worth mentioning.  I used red hat 
when it was free; rather that switch to fedora as a desktop, I eventually
chose Ubuntu.  AFAIC, no distro of linux is 'perfect' -- I have had to do
serious hack-arounds even on ubuntu.  But this new "Firmware INterface" 
but on fedora means that whoever is in charge has some hacking to do.


I've prederred the CLI to anything time-wasting and fancy.  [Right now my
desktop is a used Dell Optiplex with "something-hardware" wrong -- or
maybe it's software. the load sometimes cycles from 0.02 to 30.0+, etc.]
The Dell 3010 is vastly better.  But obviously when it is working.  And to mess
around each time I reboot is something I'd rather avoid.  Thanks to this latest 
post, some light is sinking it.  Mike, could you please clue me in if/if-not
the following steps (listed below) are correct? [regarding your mail up-
queue]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 04:01:04PM -0600, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Edik Landaveri wrote:
> > Installing a desktop environment & unistalling other shouldn't have had to screw up your boot sector. I think what you did is inadvertdly changed your bios settings. If it was working before and after that no. Do you remember having played with the BIOS settings? You can disable EFI on the BIOS if you wish. Maybe that's how was installed and then you changed. Once in a while I have a similar issue which I pinpointed to be the same, so I go back && change it to defaults & it works.
> 
> UEFI contains its own bootloader that is separate from the hard drive.
> This a "feature" of UEFI. On the old BIOS and MBR platform the BIOS
> would read the MBR and automatically boot a partition with the boot
> flag. On the new UEFI and GPT platform it will look for a default EFI
> loader or a custom EFI loader that has been registered into the EFI boot
> manager. 

/*
	be nice if the fedora [or RED HAT] guys could invest the time to
	just have things work the way you figured a couple days ago. And
	then to either let us change the new boot manager setting or let
	new installs work. out of the box.

 */

> It seems on UEFI updates (a.k.a. BIOS updates) the boot manager
> is wiped out. Fedora uses a custom-named EFI loader (grub.efi instead of
> bootx64.efi) so after a UEFI update it cannot find any OS to boot.
> 
> Here's the differences between BIOS and UEFI:
> 
> BIOS -> MBR -> GRUB
> 
> UEFI -> EFI Boot Manager -> EFI Loader -> GRUB
> 
> The EFI boot manager is not something that UEFI interfaces allow users
> to adjust so this is not something I can modify in the UEFI settings.
> The only way to configure the EFI boot manager is through the
> "efibootmgr" utility.

Okay.  Some googling around told me that this utility first showed up
in 2004.  All the more reason ffor it to have been caught by now.  Anyway,
please tell me if the following is what you meant.

	cp -rp /boot/efi/EFI/redhat  /boot/efi/EFI/boot
	cd /boot/efi/EFI/boot
	mv grub.efi bootx64.efi
	mv grub.conf   bootx64.conf


I've done this.  is there anything else before I shutdown -r now?

tx!


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-- 
 Gary Kline  kline at thought.org  http://www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
              Twenty-six years of service to the Unix community.