[Bug 1962470] Re: Jammy Live installer not producing booting EFI hard drive installations

[Michael Lueck]

This morning I reloaded the computer again, selecting gpt versus dos for
the partition table. I made the EFI and XFS partitions. The installer
did not protest, and the resulting system will not boot. I reloaded it
back to a single xfs root partition on a dos partition table, that
boots.

Something wrong with gpt partition tables all of a sudden. I use gpt
partition table with Xubuntu 20.04 perfectly fine... 500MB EFI
partition, the rest as root XFS. Not right that I must now revert to a
dos partition table in order to get a test system to boot.

There are the steps of me setting up the gpt trial this morning:

xubuntu at xubuntu:~$ sudo wipefs /dev/sda
DEVICE OFFSET TYPE UUID LABEL
sda    0x1fe  dos       
xubuntu at xubuntu:~$ sudo wipefs -a -t dos -f /dev/sda
/dev/sda: 2 bytes were erased at offset 0x000001fe (dos): 55 aa
xubuntu at xubuntu:~$ sudo wipefs /dev/sda
xubuntu at xubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install mtools
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Suggested packages:
  floppyd
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  mtools
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 201 kB of archives.
After this operation, 413 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy/main amd64 mtools amd64 4.0.33-1+really4.0.32-1 [201 kB]
Fetched 201 kB in 1s (236 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package mtools.
(Reading database ... 161715 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../mtools_4.0.33-1+really4.0.32-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking mtools (4.0.33-1+really4.0.32-1) ...
Setting up mtools (4.0.33-1+really4.0.32-1) ...
Processing triggers for install-info (6.8-4) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.10.1-1) ...

xubuntu at xubuntu:~$ sudo wipefs /dev/sda
DEVICE OFFSET       TYPE UUID LABEL
sda    0x200        gpt       
sda    0xe8e0db5e00 gpt       
sda    0x1fe        PMBR

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1962470

Title:
  Jammy Live installer not producing booting EFI hard drive
  installations

Status in ubiquity package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Starting up this weekend's Live DVD of Xubuntu, I am unable to produce
  a system that will boot EFI mode from the hard disk.

  The BIOS is configured to EFI boot mode for the disks.

  This last attempt, I manually wiped the partitions from the drive
  before launching the installer from the LiveDVD.

  Check the partition table
  sudo wipefs /dev/sda

  Wipe the gpd partition table
  sudo wipefs -a -t gpt -f /dev/sda

  Double check that the wipe was successful with the first command, came
  back empty / blank.

  Next started the Xubuntu installer from the desktop icon.

  Chose manual partitioning, created the following
  sda1 500M Primary EFI Boot
  sda2 remainder Primary xfs /

  Once the installation got done, I opened Gparted to confirm the partitions.
  The EFI partition was mounted to /target/boot/efi
  The XFS partition was mounted to /target/

  The EFI partition had boot, esp flags on it.

  I restarted the system, shuts down, exhibits the usual with Jammy
  defect 1962466, I push a key to restart, system goes through BIOS
  screens, then lands at a black screen with blinking cursor in the top
  left corner.

  Getting systems to boot from the hard drive is very frustrating in the
  era of EFI boot. :-(

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