[SOLVED] I shouldn't need no stinking UEFI!

[mla]

I have a Lenovo G580 laptop with pre-instaled Win7, and until today, Mageia 2 I installed a while back. Today Win7 decided to wipe its partition containing all user data (and some systems stuff -- I know sod all about Windows). So, no trouble, there is the Lenovo's one-button restore, which worked fine, but it did, naturally, re-install Win7's boot. Again, no trouble -- stick in a Mageia 5 DVD and let it to the GRUB magic, and might as well update that Mageia 2 installation at the same time. But hang on... Instead of the usual initial menu I get a UEFI one, consisting of : Install UEFI Mageia 5 from DVD, rescue ditto, install ditto from USB and rescue ditto. Strange, but never mind... choose the first option. OK, it gives me a chance to upgrade that Mageia 2 to 5. Worth a try -- can re-install if things don't work out. All looks well for a few screens (UK keyboard, accept terms and conditions)... But what's that? "/boot/EFI must be a mount of a FAT32 partition"? Eh??? And that's where it sits. Click on on "OK" (or whatever that button is called) just brings back the same message.

Right, let's install from scratch. Choose partitions manually, just in case. All looks well, but... having formatted the root partition I get the same darn message again! What's this "/boot/EFI" malarky? Why do I need one? A quick Google tells me there must be just one per machine -- so presumably there is one, which is why Mageia insists on UEFI install. Oh, look! -- sda1 is 200MB, just the recommended size. Admittedly it is NTFS, not FAT32, but give it a whirl. And yes, things go swimmingly, all gets installed, services configured, installing boot-loader... "/boot/EFI does not look like an EFI partition"! And that's where it sits. Rebooting the machine does not help -- it still boots straight into Win7 of course. And BTW, none of the other partitions on that single disk are FAT32 -- they are all Ext4 and NTFS.

So two questions... Why the heck do I suddenly need UEFI when Mageia 2 happily co-existed with Win7 just using plain old GRUB? And what do I do now to get Mageia working again on this laptop? Any suggestions appreciated.

[doktor5000]

You might want to check https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installing_o ... I_firmware and especially
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installing_o ... boot_media to find out definitely if your box now boots Mageia media in UEFI mode.

If that's the case, you need to simply change that at UEFI level in the boot options of your "BIOS". If it's booted, you cannot change between UEFI or legacy as a different bootloader is used.

[mla]

Thanks. Will read, digest and report back.

[mla]

Thanks, as ever, for your simple and sensible suggestion. Never occurred to me that (a) that laptop was always effectively booting in the UEFI mode (what with Win7 and Mageia 2 peaceful co-existence ) and (b) that I could just turn it off. Did the trick!

Perhaps that those installation process messages about /boot/EFI should mention the possibility of just disabling UEFI in the BIOS?

[mla]

My delight was premature. Just ran a quick re-install of Mageia 5 with the BIOS UEFI mode off, and it failed on installing GRUB2 with a message complaining that /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/modinfo.sh does not exist. And it "helpfully" suggests "Please specify --target or --directory". Eh?...

[doktor5000]

Did you select grub2 explicitly? By default you should get grub legacy, except when you select btrfs filesystem for / or /boot.

For your question, I've created https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16395

[mla]

Thanks for submitting that enhancement suggestion.

No, I did not select GRUB2. But on trying again this morning, I see that the installer defaulted to it, presumably because the original installation was done under UEFI. Changing that to plain GRUB does indeed solve the problem. I now once again have a functional laptop. Thanks!

It's still baffling, though, that the installer found itself looking for modinfo.sh, which it ought to have installed itself (or shouldn't have needed it). Something's wrong there somewhere.