JH Park - 2020-08-13

Hello.
First of all, I'd like to thank Mr. Smith for your great effort.
My PC life have been much happier since I used refind.

TL;DR
I've installed refind when installing KDE Neon(based on Ubuntu 20.04), but drivers_x64 folder is not copied to efi partition, which was on the NVMe drive(/dev/nvme0n1p1).
refind.efi and other files were copied, but not drivers folder.

Long Story goes here.

My first language is not English, so please excuse my sentences.

Following was tested on VirtualBox, not the real machine.

KDE Neon installation starts using Calamares instead of Ubiquity and it does not have option not to install boot loader, so I've made a modification on calamers following the github issue page.
For KDE Neon, the file is /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/calamares/modules/bootloader/main.py and commented out the line like this.

# prepare_bootloader(fw_type)

Then, I ran the Installation process(Install System).
I created the partition manually, like this, within the Calamares.

/dev/nvme0n1p1 : EFI with BOOT flag, 500MB
/dev/nvme0n1p2 : BTRFS for /, 19.5GB

After the file copying was finished, I opted to not to reboot, because I needed to install refind.
First, I tried refind in the Ubuntu's repository, which is 0.11.

sudo apt install refind

However, it failed because of Calamares created efi partition.
The code of efi partition was 0700, not EF00.
I think that's why refind installation failed.

I changed the code to ef00 using gdisk. (t, 1, ef00, and w)
But refind install(sudo apt purge refind and install again) also was not successful.

I think refind 0.11 does not work well on NVMe drives.
This time, I added PPA(ppa:rodsmith/refind) and then reinstalled refind.

sudo apt install refind worked good this time, however, drivers_x64folder was not copied to efi partition.

$ ll /boot/efi/EFI/refind/
total 336
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root   4096 Aug 13 18:17 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root   4096 Aug 13 18:17 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    140 Aug 13 18:17 BOOT.CSV*
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   8192 Aug 13 18:17 icons/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   4096 Aug 13 18:17 keys/
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  31891 Aug 13 18:17 refind.conf*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 283272 Aug 13 18:17 refind_x64.efi*

So I had to copy /usr/share/refind/refind/drivers_x64 to /boot/efi/EFI/refind/.

sudo cp -r /usr/share/refind/refind/drivers_x64 /boot/efi/EFI/refind/

Finally, I could boot to KDE Neon using refind.

I don't know it's a bug or as intended, or there's something wrong on my try.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this will be fixed soon.

 

Last edit: JH Park 2020-08-13