On Mon, Jan 07, 2013 at 09:51:25AM +1000, Arjen Lentz wrote:
NB the resulting setup won't dual boot. If I keep secure boot disabled, GNU/Linux boots and works perfectly - if I enable secure boot, Win8 can be started. No matter, as the Win8 is not used. We might wipe it altogether at some point.
yep, that's one of the known problems with secureboot aka restricted boot. if you want to boot to windows 8, you have to have it turned on. which means that you need to use a signed linux boot-loader if you want to also dual-boot linux without having to switch secureboot on or off depending on which OS you want to boot. i.e. microsoft now has the ability to approve (or not) which operating systems you are allowed to boot. btw, the problems i'm having with my new asus x401u have nothing at all to do with secureboot. they're entirely issues with EFI and grub.
It's possible that the Debian USB stick boot setup is a bit different - perhaps just put Ubuntu on a stick, even just to see if it that boots.
i've managed to boot a debian USB stick, tried several in fact. i've even managed to get the laptop to boot grub, so all the UEFI boot stuff is now set up correctly. so at least that problem is solved. The latest problem is that I can't get grub to reliably boot linux. choosing a linux kernel results in error messages about "no suitable mode found", usually followed by another line "Booting however", and then "Couldn't terminate EFI services". The *really* weird thing is that I can get the system to boot into linux by: 1. choosing a Linux kernel from the grub menu 2. as soon as it fails, choose Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda3)" from the grub menu. Windows will also fail to boot but grub will then immediately start booting the linux kernel I chose in step 1. *This* boot will succeed and the system will then run fine (and the laptop which is horrendously slow and sluggish in Win7 actually turns out to be reasonably fast and responsive in linux). this happens no matter which kernel I choose kernel (currently installed are 3.2.0-4 and 3.7-trunk-amd64) - whichever one i choose is the one i get after i choose windows. this is, of course, completely insane. it's a hell of a lot better than not being able to boot debian at all, but it's still broken (if something only half works then it's broken) craig ps: if i want to boot into windows for some reason, i have to go into the bios setup and change the boot order so UEFI boots "Windows" rather than "debian"....it would be nice to be able to use grub as it's supposed to work and be able to choose linux or windows, and not use the windows entry as the only way to actually boot linux. pps: yes, i have tried re-installing the grub-efi-amd64 and grub-efi-amd64-bin packages, and have run 'grub-install /dev/sda' with efivars modules load and with /boot and /boot/efi mounted. Have tried this several times with three different versions of grub (1.99-23 from wheezy, 1.99-26 from sid, and even 2.00-10 from experimental). -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #392: It's union rules. There's nothing we can do about it. Sorry.