Steve's blog

My second alpha release of a Wheezy netinst CD for amd64 EFI seemed to work OK for me and a few others, but it wasn't 100% good, with (at least) two issues:

It didn't work as a hybrid (CD or USB) image, just working from CD for EFI
It didn't work for BIOS booting due to a silly bug

In the couple of days since then, I've fixed both of these issues. Yay! Hybrid boot was easier than I expected - I've just added a tiny FAT partition to the image containing the grub EFI bootloader and that seems to work fine. I also found that I made a mistake in the ordering of the El Torito boot records in the last image. BIOS boot seems to be limited to just the first image available on the machines I've tested with, wherease EFI will happily work as a secondary image. I've swapped them around in my code, and things look much better now. So, time for another CD alpha release for testing.

Grab the image from http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/efi-development/upload3/ if you'd like to help test it. Please do, and let me know via debian-boot/debian-cd how you get on.

As previously, the "bits" subdirectory contains all the tweaked d-i packages I've played with, in both source and binary form. My debian-cd changes are still in my branch but are just about ready for merging I think. I've posted my full set of d-i patches to the debian-boot list for review now, and hopefully we'll be able to get those changes merged in after the Wheezy d-i beta 2 build is done. Full speed ahead for EFI in beta 3!

03:16 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 16 comments

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Re: Even more progress on EFI Debian CDs
Andy Cater wrote on Sat, 01 Sep 2012 21:44

Decided to do without Windows and Lenovo recovery partitions.

Burnt your latest image to CD: attached external drive to Thinkpad x121e and changed boot to UEFI only.

Booted - installed perfectly. Needed firmware-brcm80211 from non-free - also installed firmware-atheros afterwards.

If you don't install X Windows, then you need to reboot and add nomodeset in the grub stanza temporarily by command line edit in order to see the console as a one-off.

I then added KDE and it all works perfectly :)

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