1 Topic by GreatEmerald

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Topic: Booting GPartEd using EFI GRUB

I am trying to boot GPartEd on my Fujitsu Stylistic tablet PC, and there seems to be a problem getting the Live media to run in the first place. The device is using EFI (Phoenix SecureCore Tiano, which is an EFI that uses BIOS graphics for no reason at all), and when I boot from the USB media, I get into a GRUB shell. I'm familiar with the classic GRUB, but the GPartEd version of GRUB (EFI GRUB, even) is quite different, it seems. Anyway, if I try to list the partitions, I see that GRUB detects two drives, (hd0) and (hd1). If I try to list their contents, it just outputs 'unknown filesystem'. Obviously, that makes it impossible to load the GPartEd image. So is there anything I can do to make GRUB recognise the drives? The USB disk uses a simple MSDOS partition table with a single FAT32 partition, so it shouldn't cause any problems. Though I'm not sure what the SSD partition table is like (and that's why I'm trying to launch GPartEd).

2 Reply by GreatEmerald (edited by GreatEmerald 2011-10-09 11:54:51)

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Re: Booting GPartEd using EFI GRUB

I have tested things a bit now, and it seems that the 32-bit EFI GRUB has some modules missing for the msdos partition table. I recompiled it from GRUB 1.99 source and included all of the modules they had available (using the command ../grub-mkimage -d . -o bootia32.efi -O i386-efi -p /efi/boot `find *.mod | xargs | sed -e 's/.mod//g'`), and now it can read both the hard drive and the USB disk. However, once again, I'm not very familiar with GRUB2, so I'm not sure about what kernel options I need to pass in order to boot it. If I just use /live/vmlinuz and /live/initrd.img without any options, I just get a black screen on boot.

I can boot it if I use syslinux instead, though. But I would assume that using GRUB that is EFI-aware is better.

EDIT: I tried the options here:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livehd.php
But they also produce only a black screen. Well, at least I can see the GRUB menu instead of being thrown into the CLI immediately (I put grub.cfg into the /EFI/boot directory). Also, I had to omit the "bootfrom" option there, since I have no idea what it's supposed to be under the EFI system or how to find that out. That's possibly what is causing the problem...

3 Reply by stevenshiau

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Re: Booting GPartEd using EFI GRUB

Maybe you can give GParted live 0.9.1-5 a try.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted … g/0.9.1-5/
Just unzip the zip file in your FAT USB flash drive, you should see a dir /EFI/boot/ on your flash drive.
Boot the flash drive on your EFI machine to see if it works.
Please let us know the results.

Steven.

4 Reply by GreatEmerald

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Re: Booting GPartEd using EFI GRUB

It starts and shows the GRUB menu (the black one with white text). When I use any of the options, it prints "ROM image is present." and gives me a completely black screen afterwards. No kernel options seem to have any effect.

5 Reply by stevenshiau

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Re: Booting GPartEd using EFI GRUB

Do you have an USB CD-ROM? If so, please try to burn the GParted live iso and boot your machine via that CD. Maybe it helps.

Steven.

6 Reply by GreatEmerald

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Re: Booting GPartEd using EFI GRUB

No, it's a tablet PC, it doesn't have one. However, if I type in 'exit' at the GRUB prompt or if it the EFI binaries are not present, it loads SYSLINUX that allows me to boot the image. However, it would be nice to actually have a working EFI GRUB either way...

7 Reply by GreatEmerald

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Re: Booting GPartEd using EFI GRUB

Once again, it's not like it's unbootable, ISOLINUX works just fine. It's just that EFI GRUB is not working as intended and just hangs.