All,
My OpenSuse 12.3 system was working great until I tried to change the timeout on the ELILO boot. My system has a UEFI BIOS and I am using that to boot. Nothing there has changed. When my system comes up, I see the ELILO:… prompt and that’s it. The dots continue forever. I have tried entering Failsafe via this menu only to be presented with a “No active partition”. I can boot the system with the OpenSuse 12.3 DVD and to to rescue mode, and I am able to mount my boot and root partitions from the hard drive and see all the data. I have tried to edit the elilo.conf file on the boot partition, but this makes no difference. The elilo.efi and the necessary image files exist on the boot partition, so I’m not sure what else I’m missing. Anybody have any thoughts? Thanks in advance.
Why are you using ELILO??? Grub2 is what is used now though I guess you can choice ELILO at install. But as I understand you can’t configure ELILO from YAST.
Have you made a backup beforehand ? (I mean a backup of the file that you changed)
To gogalthorp, this was an upgrade from a 12.2 system and my only choice was ELILO for a UEFI system.
To ratzi, no, I neglected to backup the file beforehand. It was a moment of stupidity on my part, I know better. I’ve blown up enough systems over the years.
On Sat 13 Apr 2013 01:56:04 AM CDT, dprchic wrote:
To gogalthorp, this was an upgrade from a 12.2 system and my only choice
was ELILO for a UEFI system.
To ratzi, no, I neglected to backup the file beforehand. It was a
moment of stupidity on my part, I know better. I’ve blown up enough
systems over the years.
Hi
So what files/directories exist in /boot/efi?
On your system, can you select the option to boot from a efi file? For
example on this system I press F12 to get to boot options and on my HP
system F9.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 12.3 (x86_64) Kernel 3.7.10-1.1-desktop
up 22:22, 3 users, load average: 0.05, 0.07, 0.05
CPU Intel® i5 CPU M520@2.40GHz | GPU Intel® Ironlake Mobile
Greetings Malcolm,
In /boot/efi I have a directory SuSE and in there I have elilo.efi, elilo.conf, vmlinuz-3.7.10-1.1-desktop and initrd-3.7.10-1.1-desktop.
I don’t have a boot option to pick a boot file. The only thing I’ve been able to boot from is the install media. If I get to the ELILO: prompt, I can hit tab, which lists nothing. If I enter /efi/SuSE/elilo.efi, my system boots the DVD. If I try the vmlinuz image file, I get a kernel panic and it locks the system. I am going to try to pass additional parameters to the vmlinuz file, such as the location of the root drive, later today.
[SUB]could you show elilo.conf?[/SUB]
From boot partition:
This file has been transformed by /sbin/elilo.
Please do NOT edit here – edit /etc/elilo.conf instead!
Otherwise your changes will be lost e.g. during kernel-update.
Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Fri Apr 12 21:23:19 UTC 2013
THIS FILE WILL BE PARTIALLY OVERWRITTEN by perl-Bootloader
For the new kernel it try to figure out old parameters. In case we are not able to recognize it (e.g. change of flavor or strange install order ) it it use as fallback installation parameters from /etc/sysconfig/bootloader
timeout = 80
##YaST - boot_efilabel = “openSUSE 12.3”
prompt
append = “splash=silent quiet showopts”
verbose
delay
root
fX
default = Linux
image = vmlinuz-3.7.10-1.1-desktop
initrd = initrd-3.7.10-1.1-desktop
append = " "
label = Linux
root = /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Corsair_Force_GT_12287938000015020670-part3
From /boot/efi/SuSE::
This file has been transformed by /sbin/elilo.
Please do NOT edit here – edit /etc/elilo.conf instead!
Otherwise your changes will be lost e.g. during kernel-update.
Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Thu Apr 11 04:37:22 EDT 2013
THIS FILE WILL BE PARTIALLY OVERWRITTEN by perl-Bootloader
For the new kernel it try to figure out old parameters. In case we are not able to recognize it (e.g. change of flavor or strange install order ) it it use as fallback installation parameters from /etc/sysconfig/bootloader
timeout = 80
##YaST - boot_efilabel = “openSUSE 12.1”
default = Linux
prompt
append = “splash=silent quiet showopts”
verbose
delay
root
fX
image
message
chooser
initrd
image = vmlinuz-3.7.10-1.1-desktop
###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
label = Linux
append = “showopts apm=off noresume edd=off powersaved=off nohz=off highres=off processor.max_cstate=1 nomodeset”
description = Linux
initrd = initrd-3.7.10-1.1-desktop
root = /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Corsair_Force_GT_12287938000015020670-part3
image = vmlinuz-3.7.10-1.1-desktop
###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
label = Failsafe
append = "showopts apm=off noresume edd=off powersaved=off nohz=off highres=off processor.max_cstate=1 nomodeset x11failsafe "
description = Failsafe
initrd = initrd-3.7.10-1.1-desktop
root = /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Corsair_Force_GT_12287938000015020670-part3
You set timeout to 80 seconds which means, it will wait for 80 seconds before continue booting. IIRC elilo prints dots while waiting for timeout to expire. So far it looks rather normal behavior. Did you wait long enough?
I thought about that and let it sit for 30 minutes, which left me with a screen full of dots. In reading through a lot of stuff trying to figure this out, the timeout setting in the elilo.conf file is in tenths of seconds, so the timeout is actually 8 seconds. I suspect my issue is with one of the image files, whether it be the vmliunz or the initrd, I’m just not sure the best way to recreate them.
I tried passing a number of options at the elilo boot prompt. The only thing I can get back is when I put in the vmlinuz as the kernel file. Once I do that, I end up with a “**Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)”. **I did try to do a reinstall, importing the disk partitions so as not to lose data. The install fails. Not sure what else to do.
I tested with the same options as yours and I get “forcing interactive mode due to config file error(s)”. So elilo just sits there and waits for you to make any input.
Unfortunately I was not able to manually boot from ELILO prompt (although other posts suggest it may be possible). If you can launch EFI shell you can manually boot by running elilo.efi directly from EFI shell:
fs0:
cd \EFI\SuSE
elilo -i initrd-3.7.10-1.1-desktop vmlinuz-3.7.10-1.1-desktop root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Corsair_Force_GT_12287938000015020670-part3
Otherwise just boot any live media, mount EFI partition and clean up elilo.conf - remove
prompt
verbose
delay
root
fX
See https://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/478646-12-2-upgrade-error-occurred-while-installing-elilo-yast-bootloader-problems.html for similar problems.
Thanks for the tip on the efi shell. I tried that first and was able to have my system boot. At that point i discovered that the root password had changed and my user account was gone. Neither of these was an issue. I modified the elilo.conf per your suggestion and it worked. Thanks for all the help and suggestions.