Re: ISO installer image: GPT versus MBR partitions

["pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de>]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 05:09:05PM +0200, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Florian Pelz wrote:
> > I do not know and did not try yet how to configure GRUB to produce
> > both 32-bit and 64-bit EFI.
> […]
> Some digging in the source of grub-mkrescue and util/grub-install-common.c
> reveils that it is about the existence of $cpu-$firmware directories
> with lots of .mod files in them:
> 

This is interesting, but I am not familiar enough to try to quickly
change the guix package and I am not going to invest time in that.
The reason I was interested is that the CPU supposedly can run 64-bit
code, it is apparently just the UEFI that refuses 64-bit.  But one can
install 32-bit and then reconfigure Guix later on to use 64-bit, so it
is not important.



> > a DVD with an untreated Guix
> > git master could not be booted but very likely due to an error with my
> > external DVD drive (it often does not work)
> 
> We could start a separate endeavor in private for diagnosing that.
> (My other sport besides ISO 9660 is burning flat round things.)
> 
>

:D Burning is not the problem. ;)  This slim laptop has no DVD drive
itself and my external USB DVD drive works only sometimes and might
have required even more patience.  Booting got stuck waiting for the
DVD drive which continued to make noises, as it often does on other
machines when it has a bad day.  This was not a problem with the DVD
or the image, but with that DVD drive of mine.

I will test Danny’s patches on my Macbook and on the Ideapad.


> > I will try a current git master Guix iso built for 32-bit next.  If it
> > does not work (guixsd-install-0.15.0.i686-linux.iso did not work), I
> > will try the same with
> > dd if=/dev/zero bs=1 count=16 seek=446 of=/dev/sdc2
> 
> Was the machine similarly stuck as the Macbook ?
> That would probably be the partition problem, indeed.
> 

With the USB flash drive booting was not stuck, it just did not appear
in the boot device selection.

Regards,
Florian