[SOLVED] LibreElect won't "auto" boot

Hey guys!

I'm having a little bit of a problem here. I've been trying to make so that LE starts automatically when I turn on my laptop, but for the life of me I can't make it work. The only way to open up LE is to turn on the machine, press F9 to show the Boot Option Menu, select Boot From EFI File and then System > EFI > BOOT > bootx64.efi, otherwise it just shows me the no system error.

I've tried many different "solutions", like fixing the MBR or the GRUB, followed a lot of fixes posted on here or the rest of the internet, but no luck so far. The machine is just an old laptop that I have laying around, it doesn't have anything aside the LE/Kodi installation. The BIOS is up to date (had to install windows10 just so I could update it). Can you guys give me a hand? I just want to press the power button and start enjoying. Much appreciated.

Hi, Klojum!

There is a USB Legacy support on my BIOS if you are referring to that, and it is enabled. But the only way for me to install LibreElec on my laptop is to enable the UEFI Boot Mode and select the efi file from my usb drive, otherwise my laptop is not recognizing it. I used Rufus and the app offered here to create the flash drive and is not picking it up the "normal" way, just by doing the "Boot From EFI File" way.

Klojum,

I've been looking at the BIOS and I can't find anything legacy related content. I see a Data Execution Prevention, which I assume has something to do with Secure Boot, I'm not 100% sure about that. That's about it.

Disabling the UEFI Boot Mode produces the same results as having it enabled: No system error. The only difference is that I can no longer select the EFI file to boot LibreElec

milhouse,

I am currently having problems booting from my internal storage, after the installer made its job (see installation log), which I could only make it work using the "Boot From EFI File" method described above.

According to the SSH session (when I press CTRL+ALT+F3 to access the terminal on my laptop the screen goes black and nothing more happens), the file present on my HDD is /flash/syslinux.cfg

Here is the result of the command:

total 0
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root             0 May 15 17:19 .
drwxr-xr-x    6 root     root             0 May 15 17:19 ..
-r--r--r--    1 root     root          4096 May 15 17:19 config_table
dr-xr-xr-x    2 root     root             0 May 15 17:19 efivars
-r--r--r--    1 root     root          4096 May 15 17:19 fw_platform_size
-r--r--r--    1 root     root          4096 May 15 17:19 fw_vendor
-r--r--r--    1 root     root          4096 May 15 17:19 runtime
-r--------    1 root     root          4096 May 15 17:19 systab
drwxr-xr-x   37 root     root             0 May 15 17:19 vars

milhouse Yes, the BIOS is up to date, there hasn't been an update since Dec 2011 I believe, at least that's the one I could grab last week.

When I create a USB with Rufus for Windows 7, 8 or 10 or any Linux variant and select boot from USB from my BIOS boot menu, the system picks it up just fine, but it doesn't do that when I create it for LibreELEC in the same USB stick.

I tried installing syslinux and using the latest build in the post you mentioned before, but no luck so far. It just doesn't want to boot automatically. Also tried rEFInd Boot Manager and Super Grub2 Disk to see if I could somehow rewrite the partitions table in case there was a "missing link" somewhere, but no. What did pick up my interest was this, it doesn't allow me to run LibreELEC if I don't start my PC in UEFI mode, which can only be done manually.

I ended up installing Bodhi Linux, a lightweight deb linux distro based on Ubuntu, and then installed Kodi and configurated it accordingly to my needs. It wasn't the optimal solution, but oh well, I gave up trying the traditional way.

Thanks a lot for your time, both of you. Have a nice one!

Best regards,

D.

Well, I just couldn't give up.

Grabbed myself a copy of GParted Live CD, created the partitions manually (2GB for system, the rest for storage), copied the KERNEL and the SYSTEM files from the USB to the system partition in the hdd, and finally created my extlinux.cfg file pointing at the kernel and the respective "boot" and "disk" partitions. So far so good, the system is running. I only had a minor "problem", where the pop-up onscreen keyboard froze my machine for a moment. But all in all, I am indeed satisfied.

Best Regards,

D.