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Bug#733706: installation-report: installation on a Lenovo Thinkpad E431



Hi there!

On Tue, 31 Dec 2013 15:50:39 +0100, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> On 2013-12-31 05:45:01, Andreas Cadhalpun wrote:
>> Installing on UEFI firmware is supported, but is a little bit tricky, 
>> see for example [1]. Particularly you need a GPT partitioned hard disk 
>> with two additional partitions, one EFI partition marked with the 'boot' 
>> flag in gparted and a partition for grub marked as 'bios_grub' in 
>> gparted.

Wrong, with UEFI you do not need any 'bios_grub' partition at all:

  <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=691046#36>

> Yeah... I struggled with that before, and I *was* able to make it work,
> but since it wasn't obvious this was necessary *during* the installer, I
> did a normal MBR-based partitionning. When the boot loader failed to
> install, I didn't want to go back and redo everything, especially since
> this is a dual-boot system and I was happy to have been able to resize
> the NTFS partition at all... ;)

Sorry, but there is something strange here.  In the first email you
reported that "when I rebooted, grub was not installed in the MBR and I
was brought back into windows", which means that partman used the
partition table already present.  This can be checked with a simple
`fdisk -l /dev/sda`: if there is no GPT mention, then the partition
table is plain old MBR.

BTW, Windows 7 does not mandate GPT nor UEFI, but can use both.

>> Then the installer has to support installing on UEFI, which the 
>> default installer does, but I don't know about the one you created.
>
> I was able to dig out more information about the image since then:
>
> $ less .disk/info
> Debian GNU/Linux 7.0.0 "Wheezy" - Official Snapshot amd64 LIVE/INSTALL Binary 20130505-18:46
> $ less .disk/udeb_include
> netcfg
> ethdetect
> pcmciautils-udeb
> live-installer
>
> From what I understand, debian-installer supports installing on
> UEFI/GPT, but partman doesn't support *creating* GPT partitions, do I
> get this right?

Wrong, partman creates GPT partitions with no problem, but by default
only for disk bigger than 2TB.

> Shouldn't we create GPT partitions all the time now anyways?

Why?  IMHO if there is no need for it (because BIOS is used) plain old
MBR is easier.

>> Last but not least, you have to select the UEFI:USB in the firmware
>> and not BIOS:USB, which every firmware has a different marking scheme
>> for, but disabling legacy-bios (or equivalent option) in the UEFI
>> BIOS, should always disable the BIOS:USB option. (It can be enabled
>> again after installation.)
>
> Right, I guess this is the tricky bit. It seems that in any case, the
> user needs to go fiddle in the BIOS, which is annoying. In my case, I
> was able to install by *disabling* UEFI in the BIOS, but the reverse
> might be the case for others.

No need to fiddle in the BIOS if you simply use UEFI (d-i supports it).

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

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