CrunchBang Linux

voltagex

New Member

Registered: 2013-05-20

Posts: 1

Boot & install Debian 7 in EFI mode from USB (*test only, #! later*)

Hi all, this is pretty much my first major tutorial. These steps are not guaranteed to work.
If the Debian 7 installer runs perfectly for you in EFI mode, you don't need this! (to test this, copy the contents of the Debian 7 amd64 ISO to a FAT32 flash drive and boot it)

That said, reply if it works or if you have trouble and I'll try to help.
This is purely for testing purposes, and no I don't expect this to work with Crunchbang 11 because the installer seems to be slightly older (Wheezy RC2?)

Attempt this on a FAT32 flash drive before making changes to your EFI partiton

You will need

• A grubx64.efi file (I recommend grabbing /boot and /efi from the Ubuntu 13.04 amd64 ISO)

• A Debian 7 amd64 ISO

• A flash drive (1GB would work, but who has those anymore?)

• A laptop or motherboard that supports UEFI (unfortunately, not a Mac, because that EFI implementation is funky - use refit instead)

Downloads

• Here's one I prepared earlier - https://mega.co.nz/#F!T9ZSXIKZ!XvHH4XoAf_dyE2beEVpyZg

• The above link has two bootloaders for testing - the one from Ubuntu 13.04 and a mkstandalone grubx64.efi

• Either archive will unpack into ./boot and ./efi, so probably best to untar one in the root of your flash drive

• The mkstandalone image most likely won't load grub.cfg, so follow The Hard Way instructions below

Prepare the drive

• Extract the ISO contents to the flash drive (hint, you should be able to see a /efi and /boot directory now)

• Extract ONE of the .tar.xz files you downloaded to the root of the drive

• sync/eject the drive

Booting

• Select the USB drive using whatever method your PC has to bring up the bootloader (commonly, F12)

• You should see either the Debian installer menu or a grub command line

• If you see the menu, hit e to edit the command line and remove "quiet" and "vga=788" from the menu option, then hit F10

• If debian-installer runs successfully here, you're done - Debian will take it from here and add a boot entry at the end of the process

• If not, keep reading

The hard way

• You're at a grub command line (not grub rescue)

• The commands you need are as follows:

insmod normal
insmod efi_gop
insmod efi_uga
insmod part_gpt
insmod part_msdos
normal

At this point you should be back at the grub command line (hitting Enter after typing normal will clear the screen)
You're now going to have to do some of the heavy lifting - use the ls command to find a) the grub.cfg file, and b) the kernel and initrd

e.g. ls (hd0,msdos1)/ showed me the contents of my flash drive. From there I used the following:

configfile (hd0,msdos1)/boot/grub/grub.cfg

to load the normal grub menu and continue on with the commands from the last section.
Your paths may be different!
If you're familiar with grub, you could also run linux and initrd commands to boot from the command line.

Last edited by voltagex (2013-05-20 10:24:26)