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I'm looking for help with my Dell Inspiron 15z. I have removed all visible and hidden partitions from all the hard drives in the system (SSD and HDD). I have successfully installed openSUSE Linux 13.1 onto HDD. GRUB2 boot loader is installed onto the root partition of the Linux system (/dev/sda2). The installer can find the HDD and install the OS, but once I reboot the computer always tries to boot from a Network card. No matter what settings I try, booting from the HDD is not possible. I have tried all possible combinations in the BIOS (UEFI Secure Boot Off, UEFI Secure Boot On, Legacy). I asume there might be a problem in the BIOS settings. Any help or guidance will be welcome. Thank you.

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  • It's more likely that you've installed in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode to a GPT disk and your firmware has problems with this configuration. Posting the RESULTS.txt file generated by Boot Info Script will clarify matters. Post that file to a pastebin site and post the resulting URL here.
    – Rod Smith
    Feb 14, 2014 at 23:01
  • Hello Rob, Thank you for your suggestions. Pastebin output of the bootinfoscript is here: pastebin.com/K7dpd3X5. Please disregard the /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd. Both of them are USB pen drives. /dev/sdc1 contains the ISO image of openSUSE 13.1 network installation and /dev/sdd is a pen drive I used to transfer the bootinfoscript and its output. As you can see the EFI partition is present. I remember I had troubles with the boot loader during the installation. I was unable to install GRUB2 into MBR. I had to install GRUB2 into the root partition, e.g. /dev/sda2.
    – mabalenk
    Feb 15, 2014 at 19:44
  • I have booted into rescue mode and reinstalled GRUB2 as GRUB2-EFI with Secure Boot support. I changed the BIOS setting from Legacy to UEFI with Secure Mode. Now the attepmt to boot from hard drive results in the following message: Internal hard disk drive not found, to resolve this issue try to reseat the drive.
    – mabalenk
    Feb 15, 2014 at 20:28

3 Answers 3

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If you say you removed all hidden partitions and removed "EFI System Partition" on GPT style disk then you will not be able to boot.

For UEFI booting "EFI System" is a special hidden partition on hard disk (has special UUID) which holds boot related files - at least first stage of EFI boot loader/manager.

On disks in MBR style Windows uses a special hidden "System Reserved" partition to hold boot related files.

Usually hidden partitions are hidden for some reason ! The reason is not to be easily accessible and manipulated.

For Microsoft OS's there is also a "Microsoft Reserved" hidden partition on GPT disks - its size is 128 MB and should not be deleted.

You can recreate "EFI System" and "Microsoft Reserved" partitions using some GUI disk tool (gparted) or "diskpart.exe" in Windows on command prompt.

Then you have to re-install boot related files or re-install OS. If disk is GPT style you should boot installation DVD (or USB) the EFI way (look for boot options in BIOS/UEFI firmware).

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It looks like you've got a BIOS-mode installation of Linux to a GPT disk. Some EFIs have problems with this type of configuration. Broadly speaking, you've got three options to deal with it:

  • Convert the disk from GPT to MBR, as described here. You'll then need to re-install a BIOS-mode version of GRUB, which will probably also require creating a small BIOS Boot Partition. Alternatively, you could install LILO, SYSLINUX, or whatever other boot loader you prefer.
  • Install an EFI-mode boot loader to the disk. This will require fixing the bad partition type code on /dev/sda2 (it's currently marked as an EFI System Partition (ESP), but it's actually your Linux root (/) partition). You'll need to create a proper FAT32 ESP somewhere, which will probably entail resizing at least one partition to clear about 550MiB of disk space.
  • Research problems of EFIs and BIOSes with BIOS/CSM/legacy-mode booting from GPT disks and employ a workaround to permit this type of setup. See this page of mine for details. If you do this, you'll probably have to create a BIOS Boot Partition, and I strongly recommend fixing the type code on /dev/sda2. Chances are setting the boot flag on the 0xEE protective partition in the MBR will work around the problem. Note that I'm referring to the MBR's boot flag. You should do this in fdisk, or by setting a disk-wide flag in very recent versions of parted (I don't recall the flag's name, offhand). (I'm afraid the "boot flag" terminology is now extremely confusing because of the parted developers' long-ago choice to overload that flag name on GPT disks.)

Personally, I'd go with the EFI-mode boot option, but that's just me. The other options are perfectly valid, too. If you choose to try an EFI-mode boot, I recommend you read my page on the subject. Chances are you can do some preliminary testing with a USB flash drive or CD-R version of my rEFInd boot manager. There's a good chance that, when you boot rEFInd, it will enable you to boot your installation directly. If that works, fix the bad partition table type code issue, create an ESP, and mount it at /boot. Installing the rEFInd RPM should then get you up and running. This procedure will require rebooting to a live CD for the partition resizing operations.

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I have solved the problem. The main difficulty resided in erroneous openSUSE 13.1 boot loader installation. I believe it is a bug that wasn't fixed in the network ISO of the 13.1 distribution. To check that it wasn't a hard disk problem I have installed Windows 8 first. Linux installation proceeded flawlessly using '/boot/efi' partition created by Windows.

The steps to a solution were:

1) Update BIOS from A2 to A5.

2) Set BIOS to use default optimised settings:

 boot type UEFI, secure boot off.

3) At boot time press F12 to enter boot device menu and select UEFI DVD.

4) Launch openSUSE 13.1 installation from a DVD.

5) Create a separate partition for boot loader '/boot/efi', 100MB, FAT.

6) Install EFI version of GRUB2 (GRUB2-EFI).

7) Proceed with the usual openSUSE installation.

Thank you for your time, suggestions and help.

Attached is a picture of the hard drive partitions:

enter image description here

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