Booting installation USB on UEFI and RAID0

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’m trying to dual-boot Windows 8 and OpenSuse 13.1 on an Acer S7 191, which has 2 64GB SSD on RAID0. I downloaded the 13.1 Gnome (the DVD wouldn’t fit in my flash drive) and used ImageUSB (Tools for OSForensics - ImageUSB - Write an image to multiple USB Flash Drives) to transfer it, as OpenSuse’s official ImageWrite didn’t work on any PC/flash drive I tried. Now the flash drive is separated between a data and a boot partition. In the boot partition, there’s a EFI folder.

The problem is that when I try to boot the installation, the Acer logo just flickers continuously until I remove the flash drive (then it boots Windows). Even simply trying to open the boot menu causes the same behaviour. Of course I disabled Secure Boot and tried changing boot order and even different distros, but it didn’t work. I did manage to install OpenSuse on Legacy (BIOS) mode, but I couldn’t boot it afterwards (maybe because of RAID0).

Is it some sort of stupid “design” decision Acer took (this notebook has its fair share of quirks), or am I doing something wrong?

2

I usually try to help people with UEFI problems. But I admit that you have me stumped on this one.

On my Dell system, I hit F12 during boot, and the BIOS gives me a boot menu where I can select USB, DVD or a system (such as Windows 8) that is installed on the internal drive. But then, I have no experience with ACER.

Yes, that’s normal. Here’s the info for my live KDE installer (on USB):


# fdisk -l /dev/sdd

Disk /dev/sdd: 4004 MB, 4004511744 bytes, 7821312 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xa19f8ba9

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1            4084       12275        4096   ef  EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
/dev/sdd2   *       12276     1232895      610310   83  Linux
/dev/sdd3         1232896     7819264     3293184+  83  Linux

The third partition (sdd3) is the hybrid partition added when I booted the live system (for persistent changes).

Yours should look similar, though the partition sizes might be different. And you won’t have that third partition since you never actually got it booted.

Hard to say.

Suggestion 1: Boot into Windows. Plug in the USB while still running Windows. Then see if it works on reboot.

Microsoft has mandated that manufacturers use a fast start approach. The BIOS is not supposed to initialize USB devices, but leave that to the operating system. Dell does that sensibly – if I boot from USB, then it initializes the USB devices. But apparently some manufacturers haven’t done it that way. So, rebooting from Windows might get the devices initialized for the warm reboot (I hope).

Suggestion 2: Look into BIOS settings, to see if there is a way of disabling fast startup. Note that there is also a fast start setting in Windows 8, but that’s unrelated (though also wise to turn off).

(added in edit – oops; that “fdisk” output is from the live repair system rather than the live KDE)

3

On Sat 04 Jan 2014 09:36:02 PM CST, luizedu wrote:

I’m trying to dual-boot Windows 8 and OpenSuse 13.1 on an Acer S7 191,
which has 2 64GB SSD on RAID0. I downloaded the 13.1 Gnome (the DVD
wouldn’t fit in my flash drive) and used ImageUSB (‘Tools for
OSForensics - ImageUSB - Write an image to multiple USB Flash Drives’
(Tools for OSForensics - ImageUSB - Write an image to multiple USB Flash Drives)) to transfer
it, as OpenSuse’s official ImageWrite didn’t work on any PC/flash drive
I tried. Now the flash drive is separated between a data and a boot
partition. In the boot partition, there’s a EFI folder.

The problem is that when I try to boot the installation, the Acer logo
just flickers continuously until I remove the flash drive (then it boots
Windows). Even simply trying to open the boot menu causes the same
behaviour. Of course I disabled Secure Boot and tried changing boot
order and even different distros, but it didn’t work. I did manage to
install OpenSuse on Legacy (BIOS) mode, but I couldn’t boot it
afterwards (maybe because of RAID0).

Is it some sort of stupid “design” decision Acer took (this notebook has
its fair share of quirks), or am I doing something wrong?

Hi
Can you download the 13.1 openSUSE rescue CD (~602MB) and install that
onto a USB device and try booting, unetbootin should work, else just
use dd? This is EFI/Secure boot ready.

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 13.1 (Bottle) (x86_64) GNOME 3.10.2 Kernel 3.11.6-4-desktop
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

4

Thanks for the replies. I tried both of nrickert’s suggestions, but neither worked. And there’s no fast boot option on the BIOS, just Secure Boot. I also tried booting the Rescue CD (x64, used unetbootin) but the same thing happened.

This thread Aspire S7 can’t install ubuntu suggests disabling Raid, but apparently the OP had no problem booting the installer.

Is it possible to install OpenSuse while on Legacy mode with an EFI bootloader so I can later change it back to UEFI?

5

Then you would not be able to boot Windows if it is installed under UEFI

The problem is undoubtedly RAID. I assume you are using FAKE RAID (ie BIOS assisted) If this is a new FAKE RAID chip set then chances are that the details have not filtered down to us poor Linux users.

If you are using true hardware RAID ( an installed true hardware RAID card) then it would not be a problem

6

Yes. But to change it back, you need to be able to boot some linux system in UEFI mode, so as to have access to the “efibootmgr” command. So finding a USB or DVD or CD or similar that you can boot in UEFI mode is the key to solving your problem.

7

I’m not sure what kind of RAID it is, and I couldn’t find anything conclusive online, but I suppose it’s hardware based, at least Intel RST software says it’s RAID0 (but I know next to nothing about this topic).

8

If it is just a chip on the MB then it is most likely FAKE RAID. FAKE RAID does not incorporate a full RAID model and relies on the OS to actually do most of the work. The problem is that these chips are propritary and the interface is ill defined and not truly standard

Now just for your information RAID 0 is the most dangerous RAID type. Yes it is fast but what it does is write every other sector to a different drive. If you lose either drive for any reason you have lost your data. There is almost zero chance to recover.

9

Window’s Device Manager says it’s an Intel Raid0 Volume, is that an indication of true Raid?. And yes, I’m aware of the danger that comes with this configuration, but I keep most of my important data on the cloud and have backups on other PCs, so that not very much an issue for me.

If what’s preventing me from booting OpenSuse’s installer is indeed the RAID configuration, is it possible to just disable it, install the OS and reenable it, or would that mess everything up?

Or maybe I should try asking Acer about it, since it seems this isn’t a Linux-related problem.

10

It is possible to a) perform “grub-install --target x86_64-efi” on a legacy BIOS system. It will fail on efibootmgr step - just ignore it (newer grub adds --no-nvram option). b) boot into EFI Shell and manually start resulting grubx64.efi.

I understand that not every vendor provides a (easy) way to boot into EFI Shell though.

11

Yes, that can be a problem.

A possible work-around would be to copy the boot files to “\EFI\Boot”, and rename the main one to “bootx64.efi”. But it is harder to explain that, and more can go wrong, than to boot something into UEFI mode and run “efibootmgr” to add an NVRAM entry.

12

Well, that sound kind of risky. If this pc make it hard to simply install another OS, I doubt it would be easy, or even possible, to access the EFI Shell. Thank you all for the replies, but I’ll try talking with Acer about it - that company is so full of stupid idiossyncrasies, I wouldn’t doubt they’ve put up something to prevent Linux from booting (“it’s a design feature”, they’d say).

13

On Mon 06 Jan 2014 02:56:01 PM CST, luizedu wrote:

Well, that sound kind of risky. If this pc make it hard to simply
install another OS, I doubt it would be easy, or even possible, to
access the EFI Shell. Thank you all for the replies, but I’ll try
talking with Acer about it - that company is so full of stupid
idiossyncrasies, I wouldn’t doubt they’ve put up something to prevent
Linux from booting (“it’s a design feature”, they’d say).

Hi
You can run the efi shell from a usb device or from the hdd, the bin
files are available on sourceforge in a zip file.

If your BIOS allows browsing to an efi file, then as long as it
resides on a partition type ef00 and it’s formatted to vfat (I use
mkfs.vfat -F 16 /dev//sdX) and in a /boot/efi/EFI directory it should
fire up fine.

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 13.1 (Bottle) (x86_64) GNOME 3.10.2 Kernel 3.11.6-4-desktop
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

14

Sorry for my ignorance, but I don’t get how do I install that into a flash drive, and there are no instructions.

A friend of mine gave me the following idea: install OpenSuse on Legacy mode, boot into Windows on EFI mode, run a VM with OpenSuse’s installer and from there use Boot-Repair to install grub-efi. Would that work?

15

No. grub-efi is usually already installed anyway, it is not a problem. Problem is to modify EFI bootloader to include new entry for openSUSE, and that cannot be done while booted in legacy BIOS nor can it be done from within VM. It may be possible to do using Windows bcdedit, but I have not found how.

16

On 2014-01-05 21:16, luizedu wrote:
>
> Window’s Device Manager says it’s an Intel Raid0 Volume, is that an
> indication of true Raid?. And yes, I’m aware of the danger that comes
> with this configuration, but I keep most of my important data on the
> cloud and have backups on other PCs, so that not very much an issue for
> me.
>
> If what’s preventing me from booting OpenSuse’s installer is indeed the
> RAID configuration, is it possible to just disable it, install the OS
> and reenable it, or would that mess everything up?

I’m not sure of what I’m going to say, but here it goes: I think that if
your system is fake raid 0 (real hardware raid is expensive, so bets
are you do not have it), then even if you manage to boot the Linux
install media, you will not be able to install it, as it may destroy the
raid.

> Or maybe I should try asking Acer about it, since it seems this isn’t a
> Linux-related problem.

I don’t buy Acer for those reasons.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

17

So it looks like the only alternative is to disable RAID and have one Linux disk and one Windows one (can I have one 10GB Ext4 partition on disk 0 and set up a fake RAID with the remaining 50GB on disk 0 and the whole disk 1?), but doing so would erase all my data right? In that case I’ll do it some other time, when Windows breaks and I have to reainstall it anyway. Thank you all for you kind and helpful input, but now apparently all that’s left for me to do, is swear at Acer.

18

On 2014-01-10 00:06, luizedu wrote:
>
> So it looks like the only alternative is to disable RAID and have one
> Linux disk and one Windows one (can I have one 10GB Ext4 partition on
> disk 0 and set up a fake RAID with the remaining 50GB on disk 0 and the
> whole disk 1?), but doing so would erase all my data right? In that case
> I’ll do it some other time, when Windows breaks and I have to reainstall
> it anyway. Thank you all for you kind and helpful input, but now
> apparently all that’s left for me to do, is swear at Acer.

Wait for more opinions - the forum has been offline for some days.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

19

You can NOT have FAKE RAID on partitions it is whole disk or nothing. You can have software RAID on selected partitions. But that is not compatible between Windows and Linux!!!

Real Hardware RAID is the best solution but real starts at about $200.00 per board. And you have to be carefule because some boards are actually FAKE RAID.

If you want speed go to SSD. That is faster that RAID 0 ing two disks

I have never understood why people think RAID is some magic solution it is not. It is great if you want 99.999 uptime (RAID 1) but except for real hardware type it is just a pain.

20

On 2014-01-10 07:26, gogalthorp wrote:

> I have never understood why people think RAID is some magic solution it
> is not. It is great if you want 99.999 uptime (RAID 1) but except for
> real hardware type it is just a pain.

Oh, I absolutely agree with that.

I tell people that say that they want their data secure so they use
raid, that in that case they need to buy three disks minimum. Two for
the raid, another for the external full backup. If that is not feasible,
then dump raid, and just use the second disk for external backup instead.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)