[SOLVED] Boot Problems!!!

[mbramble]

Moving over from Mandriva 2010.2 and onto a new HP Envy Phoenix PC.

I cannot boot directly from the hard drive. I have 2 1TB drives "A" has all the Windows stuff and "B" is all Linux. Both are GPT partitioned (because if the 2nd one is MBR partitioned the Windows Boot Manager under UEFI seems to get confused and won't boot anything). When I installed Mageia I used the 2nd drive to store the boot loader. I downloaded Super Grub2 and am able to locate, and boot from, the 2nd drive. That's a bit of a pain and I don't know if this is an issue with my BIOS, type of partitioning (GPT vs MBR) or a problem with Grub during the install. I did update Grub2 as soon as I was able to log in. I had also tried to install OpenMandriva earlier in the day and was having the same problem there except that I actually got a Grub2 fail message during the install. I was able to install Mandriva 2011 and it booted (or attempted to until it hit a panic and stopped). But, at least the loader was found by my PC.

Any assistance with this issue would be greatly appreciated!!

[doktor5000]

As a general hint and golden rule: Please only one problem per thread

[martinw]

For your boot problems, you could try out the rEFInd boot manager. It works well for me.

[mbramble]

Thanks martinw, I am attempting to get that to work now.

And I edited my original post to have only one problem identified.............

[mbramble]

After doing some reading it appears (to my unknowledgeable brain) that for Grub2 to work with EEFI that you need a small FAT partition mounted at /boot/efi. I re-installed Mageia, creating this partition, and when I rebooted the PC from my Linux disk drive I had a menu with Mageia, Mageia safe and Windows. Booted right into Mageia!! Don't know if the new partition had anything to do with it but after adding it I was also able to install/boot OpenMandriva which was having the same problem. Whatever works!!

[ITA84]

The EFI specification in general requires bootable images to reside in a FAT partition (your WIndows disk should have one too). Usually Linux installations in systems with Windows use the same partition as Windows as /boot/efi (don't know if Mageia does as well), but since you had 2 separate disks and have decided to install Grub on the second one, you needed another FAT partition on that disk too.