Systemback

install bootloader greyed out in efi system

Asked by campo.felice

Greetings !
I studied a few answers seemed to adress my problem, but found no solution.

Here's my problem:

I customizied a Mint 64Bit System ( 14.04 ) on my home pc with normal BIOS, included packages systemback ( 1.8.201 ), lupin-casper ( 0.55 ), grub-efi-amd-bin ( 2.02~beta2-9 ) and casper ( 1.340, hold back from 1.340.2, because this version falls to initramfs ) and created ISO with systemback.

Then prepared a 32GB USB3.0 Stick with 4 Partitions -
1. 8GB ( FAT32),
2. 4 GB ( SWAP ),
3. 11GB ( ext4 for / ) and
4. 8GB ( ext4 for /home ),
installed ISO on FAT32 with unetbootin, booted squashfs, everything fine.

Now I wanted to install via systemback the booted squashfs ( various target machines ) on the same Stick - 11GB ( / ) and 8GB ( /home ) with Swap - and everything went fine !

if booted machine has normal BIOS and lets say Windows installed on Harddisk,
but not !! if booted machine has EFI ( secure boot disabled ) and lets say Windows ( no difference if 7 or 8.1 ) on Harddisk. In this case the "install bootloader on" - section in systemback is greyed out and I cannot install bootloader nor configure, where the bootloader should be installed.

Questions:
1. Why the install bootloader section is greyed out in this case ?
2. If I install the system with greyed out bootloader section - you will write a bootloader anyway ? If yes, on which device ( this could be very delicious ) ?
3. If you don't write a bootloader - may I chroot to the installed system and install the bootloader by hand in MBR of Stick ( supposed yes ) and efi will boot ( supposed no ) ?
4. If in the case, I must have an efi boot partition also on stick - must the efi boot partition be the first partition on stick ?
5. Or, if 4. is correct, may I mount ( or configure mount in systemback ) /boot/efi on running squashfs source system on partition 1 ?

By the way - systemback is a very, very fine tool and a extremly good piece of work. Congratulation !!
... and thanks a lot !!
Sorry for my bad english, have a nice day
Felix

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Kendek (nemh) said : 		#1

The GRUB installation is possible when the followings are true:
with BIOS:
- grub-pc-bin and grub2-common packages are installed
with UEFI:
- grub-efi-amd64-bin and grub2-common packages are installed
- the /boot/efi mount point is set (see the warning on the GUI)

If you want to create a universal installer, just install the grub-efi-amd64-bin, grub-pc-bin and grub2-common packages. But these packages are automatically installing when you install the Systemback. Except when you using the '--no-install-recommends' options.

2. No, but if possible, the Systemback run the 'update-grub' command, without the 'grub-install'.
3. If the GRUB installation is not possible, then the GRUB installation is not possible. But yeah, if you using the 'chroot' on the installed system and install the necessary packages, then the manual GRUB installation will be possible.
4. If you want to install the - working - GRUB on the UEFI system, you will need the followings:
- a UEFI-detected device with GUID partition table
- a FAT32 (VFAT) partition (~100 MiB) under the /boot/efi mount point (do not need to using the first partition)
Remark: some UEFI implementations can not detect the Linux-system as an operating system. In this case you need to open the UEFI boot menu and select the Ubuntu (or set the boot entry in the UEFI setup).

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