CD images aren't able to boot off USB sticks in uEFI mode

[Mario Limonciello]

Current daily natty images properly offer a uEFI option in the boot menu when burned to CD. When burned to a USB stick however, there is no boot target option offered.

This appears to be because the stick doesn't have a efi/boot/bootx64.efi file in it. This file can be found in boot/grub/efi.img (if loop mounted).

Copying this file from boot/grub/efi.img to efi/boot/bootx64.efi causes an option to be presented as a potential target.

I see two ways to solve this:

A) Keep efi/boot/bootx64.efi in the ISO image when it's mastered
B) Teach USB-Creator to loop mount boot/grub/efi.img if found and extract efi.img as well.

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

Additionally, it seems the the bootx64.efi that's contained in efi.img isn't sufficient to allow booting a USB device. It appears that it doesn't have support for reading msdos partition tables.

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

I've attached a branch that I believe should handle the first problem. The second problem i've filed as a separate bug against grub (bug 677758).

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks! I've merged this debian-cd patch for now. However, this is an extra 350KB or so on the amd64 CD size, and given all the other pressures I suspect this may not be sustainable, so it would still be worthwhile looking into doing this in usb-creator.

[Laurent Bigonville (bigon)]

I've downloaded the alpha1 natty iso and used usb-creator from natty too and this seems fixed, /efi/boot/bootx64.efi is present on the usbstck

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package usb-creator - 0.2.27

---------------
usb-creator (0.2.27) natty; urgency=low

  [ Mario Limonciello ]
  * If the EFI bootloader isn't present in the proper location but efi.img is
    available in boot/grub, extract the EFI bootloader and place it in the proper
    location. (LP: #677260)

  [ Evan Dandrea ]
  * Hide partition table block devices by default. To revert to the
    previous behavior, pass --show-all to usb-creator-gtk.
  * Increase the minimum persistent storage size to 1G.
  * Add a 30MB padding for the kernel and initramfs (LP: #562312).
 -- Evan Dandrea <email address hidden> Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:42:25 +0000