my perfect storm - windows8.1 update EFI stub and CONFIG_CMDLINE

[Fores Sorj]

Two days of hell all started by having to look at some windows 8 stuff. The laptop had an OEM win8 on it that I never used. I put rEFInd on it as soon as I got it and haven't looked at win8 since. It's been a while and not sure what version of rEFInd I have.

I booted into win8 and there were lots of updates that wanted to be installed so I let that happen. A few reboots and a few more updates. It took all day.

Then I made the mistake of trying to upgrade to 8.1 because they told me "It's Free" (not as in Freedom) That I let run over night, it was a huge download. The upgrade failed
and I didn't bother with it. But when I tried to go back to linux I got a failure and
after hours of digging I figured out that the efi stuff in Microsoft/BOOT was over-written. My laptop has to have things in EFI\Microsoft\BOOT which took me a long, long time to figure out when I first installed rEFInd way back 2-3 years ago. The 8.1 upgrade did this and now I got only a screen with an error about a missing BCD file.
No more rEFInd boot screen.

After a lot more poking around and trying to remember all the stuff about rEFInd that
I forgot because it all just worked fine for booting linux.

I was able to boot back into my linux finally by doing a temporary work around using a rEFInd usb boot stick. Then I built a new linux kernel with NTFS rw support. I mounted the win8 volume and found the efi files including a BCD file. Copied the BCD to EFI\Microsoft\BOOT but that did no good. I still got the MS boot mgr and error.

Too many moving parts for me and it's not really my area of expertise. But I know enough to know that I could really make things worse messing with the disk, etc.

I then decided that this automatic 8.1 upgrade from the Store was broken so I found a way to download an iso from MS (not until later did I find out that I need a Product Key
which you don't get when you have an OEM Windows version, which I also didn't know)

The iso is big too so I let it download. In the middle of downloading a window popped up saying that the 8.1 upgrade is continuing but needs to reboot. It was late and one window showed the 8.1 iso download and another showed that 8.1 upgrade needs to reboot or it threatens to reboot within 2 days. I started to think of that Asimov story where the kids tell the robot to dismantle itself for fun and I decided against removing win8 altogether.

This is where everything tanked because the f'ing win8.1 upgrade repartitioned the HDD!!
What the hell right? Very uncivilized. Now I can't boot into linux, I get a VFS panic.
But looking close at the kernel output on boot I notice that my linux partition is now a
NTFS partition. I thought I was totally screwed and lost my linux partition.

So yes win8.1 adds a recovery partition and now everything gets bumped up by 1.
Why is this a problem?

My system is config'd with CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y and I forgot that I also use CONFIG_CMDLINE to hard code the kernel boot options including ro root=/something/something/etc/

So it all seems harmless but really I put the blame all on MS.

One other strange thing was that I found a BOOTSECTOR.BAK on the efi partition and have no idea what put it there or why???

Now I'm way too familiar with rEFInd, but it never caused any problems. All my problems came from windows8.1 upgrade and that coupled my unique kernels made for the perfect storm of misery. Maybe someone else will find this helpful/useful.

One funny thing, one time during this whole debacle I found an app in windows8 that showed all the partitions on the HDD, there were 9 and all of them except the EFI partition were shown with 100% free space! Wow! parted was my friend throughout this whole nightmare and knoppix.

The command "knoppix 2" to be exact from a knoppix7.2 cd
I built a new kernel from knoppix shell and changed the boot options to reflect the
new partition numbering and also changed fstab.

Now I have very little desire to boot win8.1 and it will just sit there for now
unused and definitely unloved.

BTW my laptop is an ASUS

[Roderick W. Smith]

I'm sorry to hear of your woes. If you need help, I recommend you run the Boot Info Script and post the RESULTS.txt file it generates to pastebin.com or some similar site. Boot Info Script collects a bunch of boot-related information in one output file, so its summary can be very helpful in debugging boot-related problems. You're probably better off posting about this to a forum dedicated to your Linux distribution, though, since you'll get more eyes looking at it than you'll get here.