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<body class='hmmessage'><div dir='ltr'>The ultrabook is a T<br><h1 itemprop="name">oshiba Portege Z930-145 i5-3317U/4GB/128GB SSD/13.3"</h1>While inside of BIOS, I see:<br>System BIOS Version 6.40<br>EC Version 1.20<br><br>Any other details that I can help you with?<br><br><div>> Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 00:12:02 +0100<br>> From: steve@einval.com<br>> To: alberaan@hotmail.com; 708430@bugs.debian.org<br>> Subject: Re: Bug#708430: EFI Bug<br>> <br>> retitle 708430 need to also install grub to the removable media fallback path?<br>> thanks<br>> <br>> On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 06:28:52PM +0000, Alberaan ...y seré por siempre Alberaan wrote:<br>> >Package: grub-efi-amd64<br>> >Version: 1.99-27+deb7u1<br>> <br>> Hi Alberaan,<br>> <br>> Thanks for reporting the bug as I requested. :-)<br>> <br>> >We have been having trouble trying to boot to a debian system. Just<br>> >after a correct installation, debian didn't boot. The "Toshiba" logo<br>> >from my pc was stuck. Someone on #debian-boot told me he thought this<br>> >is what was happening:<br>> ><br>> >http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/4125.html<br>> <br>> Yep, it seems this was the core of your problem. The suggestion to use<br>> Ubuntu's rescue-boot script only confused things further, hence why it<br>> took so long to diagnose the problem.<br>> <br>> >Using debian installer in rescue mode, we did (sda1 being boot<br>> >partition, sda2 the / partition):<br>> ><br>> >mkdir /target<br>> >mount /dev/sda2 /target<br>> >mount /dev/sda1 /target/boot/efi<br>> >mount --bind /sys /target/sys<br>> >mount --bind /proc /target/proc<br>> >mount --bind /dev /target/dev<br>> >chroot /target<br>> ><br>> >cd /boot/efi/EFI<br>> >mkdir boot<br>> >cp debian/grubx64.efi boot/bootx64.efi<br>> ><br>> >We then rebooted and it worked.<br>> <br>> Yes. grub-installer was correctly creating and installing the<br>> grubx64.efi executable in a valid path and attempting to instruct your<br>> laptop's firmware to boot it. BUT: it seems that the firmware is buggy<br>> and ignores EFI boot entries when they are created. By copying the<br>> grub executable to the fallback removable media path, your machine<br>> will now boot. This temporarily solves your problem with booting.<br>> <br>> The problem with doing this is that at some point in the future when<br>> you upgrade to a newer version of the grub package, things will stop<br>> working. Newer versions of the grub-efi-amd64-bin package will replace<br>> the debian/grubx64.efi file and the modules that it loads, but *won't*<br>> replace the temporary copy we've made in boot/bootx64.efi. At some<br>> point, compiler changes or internal grub changes are likely to break<br>> compatibility between the old grub binary and new modules and at that<br>> point your bootloader will break again.<br>> <br>> Fundamentally, the bug here is in the firmware of your Toshiba<br>> laptop. Alberaan, Could you please tell us more details of the laptop?<br>> Ideally we would like to have the model number and the firmware<br>> revision so that we can log that information somewhere for future<br>> users.<br>> <br>> Secondly (and this is more to Colin): as we've now seen this failure<br>> mode in the wild in more than one case, I think that we need to add<br>> (optional?) code to grub-install to tell it to *also* install to the<br>> fallback removable media path. We could do a few things here:<br>> <br>> (a) use a blacklist of known-bad make/model/firmware versions and<br>> automatically trigger the fallback installation when we detect<br>> one<br>> <br>> (b) do the Windows thing: always install to the fallback path if<br>> nobody else already has; we'd need to detect if the<br>> previously-installed fallback file is from an older version of<br>> grub-efi and if so upgrade it <br>> <br>> (c) ask the user the question (and store their answer in /etc or<br>> debconf or *somewhere*): "do you want to install to the fallback<br>> path too?"<br>> <br>> What do you think?<br>> <br>> -- <br>> Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com<br>> "Because heaters aren't purple!" -- Catherine Pitt<br>> <br></div> </div></body>
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