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 ...

Tried to install elemerntary os freya beta on sda1 (where luna was previously). This failed and apparently too the MBR and grub2 with it. Tried to fix with grml usb, but that made loud noises and I couldn't reinstall grub2 or do anything once chrooted into mint ("could not resolve host grml", "sudo: grub2-install command not found" it whinged). Fixed it by following article in Linux Voice. Booted up ubuntu live CD (which took forever), then: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair (LV had this down as Boot Repair, so had to fiddle that right!) sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair run boot-repair , then just click the recommended action button to let it fix the bootloader. reference url it gave me: http://paste.ubuntu.com/ 9710851/ Phew. Now I need to look at using sda1 and its 200 gigs for something constructive.