No Way Know How

Just realised I never concluded my strand on trying to get arch installed with UEFI boot on the asus laptop. I've given up, but I think I have good reason to. It's clear that unless the arch live iso boots with UEFI, the hooks, or efi variables or whatever (this happened a while ago) are not available to the ne w installation. The asus wouldn't boot in UEFI mode when I burned a disk either, and none of the suggested workarounds were getting me anywhere (the most common idea was to copy the contents of one efi boot file to another - presumably to force UEFI boot - but then I got into this whole read-only filesystem bullshit that was too much of a K-hole to resolve). Funnily enough, almost all the references to this issue that I could find online had to do with asus motherboards of one sort or another, so I'm chalking this up to shitty UEFI implementation on my cheapo asus and leaving it at that. The main purpose of the exercise was just to see how fast I could get ...

I was sure I wrote this stuff down the first time I fumbled through an arch uefi install. Guess not. Since this is going to be the process I use in whatever new laptop I end up getting, I thought I'd best record it as I go. A few differences from previous arch self-guide. I'm not doing the partitioning from a gui in a live CD, I'm just using the archlive installation usb to run cli programs like gdisk. I'm also not using LVM - I'll need to look at how that works with UEFI and stuff going forward. I'm using a 128G SSD, so don't need / can't have loads of other OSs. Anyway, let's go. Clear disk, create partitions and filesystems Boot into the latest arch iso then run gdisk on the disk you want to use (sda here): gdisk /dev/sda Clear the existing partition table: O Create a new EFI System partition n 1 [return] +512M ef00 Create swap partition: n 2 [return] +2G 8200 Create a partition on the rest of the disk for the OS and ...

I've been messing around trying to get this working and my current train of thought is as follows: The efivars stuff isn't mounted or even present int newly installed arch system. Nor is it so on the live installation medium. I dont think I can get the new system to uefi boot unless the uefi kernel parameters are present in the live medium. I was assuming that the live USB was booting in efi mode but when I manually try to select this in the BIOS it fails. I turned off legacy boot for USB in the BIOS and the USB wouldn't read at all. So the only fix I have to pursue right now involves going into the USBs EFI/boot directory and copying loader.EFI to bootx86.EFI (or something). Trouble is, this is a read only filesystem and none of the workarounds for that have worked. I tried mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda and hdparms -r0 /dev/sda1 and variations and combinations of these but it insists the fs is read only. Current plan is Make fs rw Cp loader to x86 file as above Bo...