Yeah, you need to have a fat32 partition – you might need to have created it when you installed Ubuntu. I don’t think that Ubuntu supports EFI in its default install, so you need to manually copy the kernel and initramfs over to the fat32 partition (same structure as on my install tarball).

Not sure how much that helps..

-c

I successfully installed Ubuntu 8.04 from the USB drive. It’s on a second hard drive, so I removed the MacOS drive and tried to boot, but I just get a question mark folder cause it can’t find a system folder.

I’m assuming it’s because there’s no FAT partition on the drive with an efi/boot/ directory, GRUB2 EFI binary, GRUB config, kernel and initramfs. But I can’t figure out how to add it.

I installed MacFUSE and FUSE-EXT2, so I can access the drive through the Finder (MacOS won’t read the ext2 file system and will want to reformat the drive otherwise), but I can’t add a new partition through Disk Utility or diskutil in the terminal without wiping the drive. Should I have formatted the drive before I did the install with a FAT32 partition for the EFI and a GUPT FAT32 partition on which to install Ubuntu?

Thanks, any help would be appreciated.

You can just copy any initramfs and kernel to the efi folder and edit the configuration file to add that as a new entry. You could also overwrite one of the existing ones, and just boot that one from the menu.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Chris

Sorry for the delay in replying.

So where are you up to exactly? If your drive already has the fat32 partition and GPT partition table, then you can just mount it under a live CD and copy the files across from your /boot drive (is that what you need help with?).

Or, if you don’t have anything yet and your distro won’t create a GPT partition table or fat32 partition, you can create that manually using parted on a live CD (is that what you need help with?).

Let me know and I’ll be happy to help if I can!

Cheers,
Chris

However, I am stuck on something that you probably consider to be really basic. In the installation section you state:

“The drives need to be GPT and to have a small FAT partition at the beginning with the efi/boot/ directory, GRUB2 EFI binary, GRUB config, kernel and initramfs.

There’s probably a better way to do this, I’m sure some distros will support GRUB2 and EFI out of the box soon. In the mean time I install the OS without a boot loader and create the efi/boot/ system manually.”

My question: How exactly do you do this? I complete the installation, but when I reboot, that stuff is not there.

So how do I create a GPT partition on the hard drive with an /efi/boot directory and put those files on it?

Sorry to be so confused over such a simple matter, but it’s just frustrating to be so close but not quite there.

Thanks again for the great information.

Regards,

Garn

-c

I also added ‘irqpoll’ to the boot command…

A 64 bits Squeeze Debian Xserve… ))

Thanks Chris,
Kam

Many thanks for your contribution.

I finally did it too !!

I have an Intel Xserve 2.0QX (bi quad Xeon) that was unused and planned to use it with Debian Squeeze.

I’ll share the deadends I ran into, if it can help others…

I created the USB key following your instructions and all went well.
I planned to install Debian using a non-Apple disk via a USB to SATA adapter (external disk) : don’t… Apparently, the installer won’t install Debian on an external disk.

After booting on the USB key and installing Debian on an internal non-Apple disk, I could not see the EFI part of the internal disk at boot time, although I could see the EFI part when the same disk was connected thru USB to SATA (external disk).

I finally used an Apple (logo’d) internal disk to boot (sda1 contained EFI partition) to install the Debian system on sda3 (sda2 is swap).
NB : I tried the Xen kernel first. Did not work (bad magic number). The regular Kernel works.

Here’s my grub menuentry :
menuentry “Debian Squeeze 64″ {
fakebios
linux (hd0,1)/efi/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-amd64 root=/dev/sda3
initrd (hd0,1)/efi/boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-amd64
}

I still have some modprobes ‘blocked for more than 120 seconds’ issues but, at least, the server runs…

Thanks again Chris !!

Kam