Re: AMI Aptio EFI booting problems on ASUS G73SW-A1

[Bruce Dubbs <bruce.dubbs@gmail.com>]

Nate Weibley wrote:

> Per your suggestion I tried other linux distros with various kernels. So far
> none of the EFI enabled distros are working. They do work if booted via BIOS
> though, of course. Windows 7 64bit *does * boot appropriately via EFI, so
> it's hard to say where the fault is. If Windows is booting though, it seems
> more likely something is going wrong in the Linux kernel EFI handling, or
> perhaps as you say GRUB is passing incorrect pointers. Either way, they all
> exhibit the exact same behavior... the kernel is loaded, and at the point
> init should be called, the system stalls with no debug or error message.
> 
> I will continue testing as kernel revisions are released, but I'm not sure
> how else I can bang away at trying to get EFI to boot without any sort of
> error message or debugging info.

I am not an expert in GRUB or EFI, but what it sounds like to me is that 
the initrd for the systems you are using does not have EFI support.

Personally, I never use initrd but build my own kernels with all 
capabilities needed built in (not modules).  You can test this by 
building your own kernel and ensure EFI_PARTITION is built in during the 
configure phase.

   -> File systems 

      -> Partition Types 

          -> Advanced partition selection (PARTITION_ADVANCED [=y])

Then if the kernel image is, say, /boot/linux-2.6.37, an entry in 
boot.cfg like:

menuentry "My test kernel" {
         set root=(hd0,<your partition>)
         linux   /boot/linux-2.6.37 root=/dev/<your partition> ro
}

would be all that's needed.

That may not be your final answer, but if it does boot, then GRUB is 
doing it's job and the problem is in the distro you are using.

   -- Bruce