TUTORIAL UEFI UEFI BOOTING BOOT TUTORIAL CAMP (REBOOTED) Upgrade your the way your system boots without installing a GRAHAM MORRISON distribution or resorting to Grub. e’ve been using the BIOS for decades. It’s to install another operating system. In reality, the as perennial as your keyboard and mouse, Secure Boot cataclysm has yet to materialise, as Wbreathing life into inert hardware when a many PCs still include a traditional BIOS or allow little electricity is applied. These days, the POST status you to disable Secure Boot. The latter option should messages delivered after your BIOS initialises the always be available, and you’ll need to disable Secure system race across the screen so quickly you seldom Boot unless you want to start dealing with signing a get the chance to read the text, making entering bootloader shim. the BIOS itself a mad keyboard-bashing mini-game that more often than not ends with Grub than the Muddy waters configuration menus you’re after. Modern PCs aren’t Another potentially confusing option is something well suited to the old-school charm of the BIOS. They called the Compatibility Support Module. To the user, don’t want to wait for permission, they don’t want low- this will appear as a hybrid between UEFI and the res large white fonts on a blue background. They just BIOS, a magical panacea that seems to allow us to want to get on with the job at hand, and that’s booting forget about UEFI and BIOS completely. You’ll typically your computer. see its effects from your computer’s own boot device And so the BIOS is being wheeled out, albeit slowly, selection menu, usually the one you get when you while its replacement makes itself comfortable. hold F12 after turning on your machine. What’s not Initially developed by Intel, the booting heir was called always made clear is that the mode you boot into the EFI – the Extensible Firmware Interface. But it’s from this point will affect how your Linux distribution now better know as UEFI. The U is for unified, because installs itself, which in turn affects whether you’ll be it’s not just Intel anymore. UEFI has been hanging over able to boot Linux from a UEFI boot. An installer won’t the Linux boot system like the Sword of Damocles, install a UEFI bootloader, for instance, unless you boot threatening to upend the booting status quo and into UEFI mode. And if your install medium doesn’t exclude us from installing our own operating systems, support a UEFI bootloader, you’re stuck. thanks to the spectre of Secure Boot. Secure Boot is But defaulting to a UEFI installation and forgetting a system that embeds a key without your firmware about the BIOS and the Compatibility Support Module so that only operating systems signed by the key is beginning to make more sense. Modern laptops are allowed to boot. It’s primarily a way for Microsoft are often pre-configured to boot UEFI, and there will – in part, legitimately – to ensure nothing has been be a time when falling back to the BIOS won’t be an tampered with from the very first moment your PC option. But these days, there’s nothing to be scared gets power to the moment you get to play with the of, and in many ways, UEFI can make the whole inspirational Windows 8.1 interface. But it could booting process more transparent. The bootloaders also make life harder for when you do intentionally may, at the moment, feel slightly more primitive that want to tamper with your PC by making the choice their well worn BIOS equivalents, but to us the boot process actually makes more sense than the black arts involved in the old methods. If you’ve spent the last decade thinking about booting in terms of MBR bootloaders, Grub and old-style partitions, get ready to update your notes. We’re going to create our own UEFI boot environment, and we’ll be doing this primarily from the Mint Live desktop as found on last month’s DVD, in much the same way you might fix a broken MBR installation or reconfigure Grub. You can use any similar distribution, however, as there’s nothing Mint- It doesn’t look much, specific about our instructions. We’re also going to but this is the Refind use a 1GB USB stick to get around the limitation of bootloader running from BIOS-only booting DVD drives, but we’ll only use this to our new EFI partition. ‘fix’ the installation, rather than initiate it. 92 www.linuxvoice.com UEFI TUTORIAL The system we create won’t be perfect. It won’t Depending on which boot handle distribution updates to the kernel without a option you take, your little further tinkering, and you’ll need to make plenty system will boot into either of considerations for your own hardware rather than UEFI or BIOS boot modes. these instructions for ours. But you will learn how UEFI works from a practical perspective, and learn how to troubleshoot the future of Linux booting. Look into the black box The great thing about taking control of UEFI yourself is that you don’t have the problem of which mode your system has booted from – UEFI or BIOS, which is especially useful if you’re booting off a DVD that can only boot in the old BIOS mode. When you get one distribution running , it’s easy to add more, and it can also be the only way of running the latest Microsoft Windows or even Apple’s OS X alongside. Mint 16 and many other distributions have their own preliminary support for UEFI bootloaders, as and you’ll find it in Mint 16’s Administration menu. It’s long as you’ve booted into the correct boot mode, an application that hides a lot of power. In the top-right but we’ve found its approach a little unpredictable, you’ll find a drop-down list of all the drives detected along with many other distributions. We had similar and connected to your system. When you select one problems with Mageia, for example. Which is why of these drives, the horizontal bar beneath the menu we want to roll our own – the intention being to will become populated with a graphical representation learn more about how it works and how you might of the partitions on that drive. Each partition is a self- approach installation with a distribution that doesn’t contained horizontal block and its border colour is support UEFI. And the real trick isn’t installing the used to show the filesystem used for each partition. distribution, it’s configuring your drive in such a way Within each partition, a yellow bar is used to indicate that it works with UEFI. The most important part is how much space is taken up by data, with white used booting to a Live distribution, to indicate free space on the partition. This is handy if But before we get to the booting part, we need to you want to use free space to resize a partition. start with partitioning. To boot UEFI, need to use a different partitioning scheme. So you’ll need a spare Danger: partitioning! drive – or one you’re willing to sacrifice, as all the Make sure you select the correct drive from the PRO TIP data it contains will be removed in the process, and drop-down list. If you’ve only got one drive installed, you’ll need to be confident about your current drive this isn’t going to be a problem. If you’ve got five, you If you’re installing Linux alongside Windows, make configuration. We’re going to be reformatting the drive need to be certain the drive you’re selecting is the one sure you disable Fast and you don’t want to overwrite or repartition personal you intend to partition for a UEFI bootloader, because Startup and Secure Boot. data in the process of experimentation, so it may even you’re going to remove all the data on the drive in the be wise to disconnect any other drives. With all that in process. Our drive, for example, already has a Linux mind, locate your nearest Linux live CD and USB stick partition on it, but this is going to disappear in the very and boot your machine. next paragraph – you have been warned. There’s nothing wrong with the command line, The old partitioning scheme used a table to store but when it comes to partitioning drives, we like the the partition data, and this table was stored on the visual safety net provided by GParted. Fortunately, this Master Boot Record (MBR), a statically located 512 essential application is part of most live distributions, bytes allocated to explain the layout of a drive to the BIOS. Nearly all Linux drives prior to UEFI used MBR, and MBR can still be used in some cases with UEFI. But it’s better to make clean break. The first thing we need to do with our drive is create a new partition table. With your drive definitely selected, click on a partition on the drive and select Device > Create Partition Table from the menu. From the dialog that appears, click on ‘Advanced’ and while avoiding the temptation to click on ‘amiga’, select ‘gpt’ as the partition type followed by Apply. All the data on that drive is effectively dead to us now, and you’ll see there are no partitions on your drive.