One-line fix suggestion for failing UEFI boot

[Fred B]

Hello,

for the last day I was trying to figure out why Slax would not boot on my laptop with UEFI (but was booting fine on my other older laptop with legacy bios).

After a bit of trial and error, I could find a simple fix. (At least it works for me, on both of my laptops now.)

The problem is that when booting in UEFI with the config from /EFI/Boot/syslinux.cfg, it does a INCLUDE /slax/boot/syslinux.cfg, which in turns loads the UI module from: UI /slax/boot/vesamenu.c32 (first line)

But when in UEFI, we should be loading this module from EFI instead: /EFI/Boot/vesamenu.c32 (it is not the exact same module, don't know why)

So my suggestion is to simply change the first line of /slax/boot/syslinux.cfg to this instead:

UI vesamenu.c32

(e.g. remove the absolute path /slax/boot/, and use relative path)

This way, it will always load the correct module found in the current working directory, whether it is /slax/boot/ or /EFI/Boot/ (depending on the boot type).

(More details on working director from syslinux here: https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Config#Working_directory)

I tested that this works on both EFI/LEGACY boot.

Another possible fix would be to replicate the original syslinux.cfg into /EFI/Boot/, as suggested by Venejo (last post from https://www.slax.org/blog/27960-Slax-s-Recent-Release-A-Tale-of-Challenges.html) But that would duplicate the config file. Simpler to only keep one.

Thank you Tomas for this OS ! Cheers.

[Tomas M]

Thank you very much for your suggestion, it has been pushed to live-kit now and it will be in the next slax release.

Just for info, before this change, was there any error message during boot? Or it just failed silently? 

Tomas M

Dne so 17. 2. 2024 22:48 uživatel Fred B <fredb...@gmail.com> napsal:

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[Fred B]

Sure you are welcome !

No without the change, the UEFI boot just fails silently with a completely blank screen. Even doing Ctrl-alt-del to reboot doesn't work.

However, on my other laptop with legacy bios, I tried just for fun to load the EFI module with:

UI /EFI/Boot/vesamenu.c32 
In this case I do get an error, and a boot prompt:

Failed to load COM32 file /EFI/Boot/vesamenu.c32

boot: _ 

I guess it would be nice to have some similar error with the UEFI boot.

Thanks for the quick push,

Fred