userdoc:boot-bios-uefi

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Boot Mode: Legacy BIOS or UEFI

AstLinux 1.4.5 or earlier only supports Legacy BIOS booting.

AstLinux's SSD has a FAT16 formatted 1st partition marked as bootable with a master boot record (MBR). Hardware Legacy BIOS will jump to syslinux installed on the FAT16 partition which in turn calls RUNNIX (minimal Linux kernel also on the FAT16 partition), and lastly kexec the desired AstLinux run image.

New installations of AstLinux 1.4.6 or later support both Legacy BIOS booting and UEFI booting. These new installations include RUNNIX 0.6.10 or later.

RUNNIX 0.6.10 or later is required to boot with UEFI.


Old Installation Upgrade to UEFI boot:

If you have upgraded an old system to AstLinux 1.4.6 or later, you will continue to use Legacy BIOS as you did before. By default, if you have a RUNNIX version earlier than 0.6.10 and you upgrade to RUNNIX 0.6.10 or later, you will continue to use Legacy BIOS as you did before. This is typically what you want.

Upgrading RUNNIX will not add UEFI files in the EFI/BOOT/ directory if it does not exist, which is the case for old installations.

If for some reason you want to enable UEFI boot in your hardware's BIOS for an old installation, you can manually perform the following steps …

First upgrade to AstLinux 1.4.6 or later and reboot.

Then, from the CLI:

mount -o rw,remount /oldroot/cdrom
mkdir -p /oldroot/cdrom/EFI/BOOT
mount -o ro,remount /oldroot/cdrom
upgrade-RUNNIX-image upgrade https://lonnie.abelbeck.com/runnix-efi

Then reboot and enter your hardware's BIOS Setup and enable UEFI or UEFI only. Save and boot, you should now boot with UEFI.

  • userdoc/boot-bios-uefi.1650818858.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2022/04/24 11:47
  • by abelbeck