Installing Debian on a HP EliteBook 8570p in UEFI mode using debian-wheezy-amd64-efi-test4
I just got a brand new HP EliteBook 8570P, and decided to try an UEFI
based install since I like making life difficult for myself.
Step one was swapping out the Windows 7 HDD for a new SDD...
First thing I noted (not related to the Debian UEFI support) was that the
BIOS was sometimes upset that there was no partition named HP_TOOLS on the
SDD (meaning that self-tests and bios updates, etc, wasn't supported any
more).
Details:
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01951773.pdf
I then proceeded to write this image to a USB stick (using dd):
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/efi-development/upload4/debian-wheezy-amd64-efi-test4.iso
And then enabled native UEFI (without CSM) in the BIOS and booted the USB
stick.
Worked fine, d-i started and continued until it wanted to load additional
components from CD. The USB stick didn't seem to show up anywhere
(including e.g. /sys/block). Wasn't able to figure out what was going on (I
imagine it might have something to do with the HP BIOS boot-from-usb
emulation?).
I burned the image to a CD-RW and tried again. That worked like a
charm...d-i did it's thing and then rebooted.
First problem: HPs UEFI support seems a bit gimped. Essentially, the
firmware ignores efibootmgr entries (it does actually respect BootNext
though, so I can reboot to grub once after setting bootnext), meaning that
the GRUB EFI image wasn't found.
Fix: manually select the GRUB EFI image (by pressing F9), boot once, then
copy /boot/efi/efi/debian/grubx64.efi to either:
/boot/efi/efi/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI; or
/boot/efi/efi/Microsoft/BOOT/bootmgfw.efi
More info:
http://www.linlap.com/wiki/hp+elitebook+8460p
(see the UEFI section and the comments)
Second problem: grub seems confused by the UEFI environment, when booting
an entry, it prints:
error: no suitable mode found.
Booting however
And the screen stays like that until the intel gfx driver is loaded by the
kernel and resets the mode (after which the console works as expected). Not
a big problem but if the boot fails and you get kicked to the initramfs
shell, you'll be typing blindly.
Workaround: I didn't install the "desktop" task (I just did the most basic
install possible), but if I would have, grub would have been configured for
a graphical splash screen which seemed (IIRC) to fix that problem.
Another workaround is provided here (which I tested and it works...though
I just loaded the efi_gop, efi_uga and font modules):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting#Selecting_the_.28U.29EFI_Graphic_Protocol
Besides that, everything seems to have worked as expected (btw, the
HP_TOOLS partition can be created in d-i, just create a 2GB GPT partition,
name it HP_TOOLS and copy everything over from the HP_TOOLS partition on
the old HDD).
Thanks for your hard work Steve.
Regards,
David
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