UEFI "hello world" won't boot on physical hardware

zaval · **Posted:** Mon Oct 28, 2019 10:22 am

unfortunately, it looks like incompliant, buggy FW you faced. the only thing to suggest, is to try the same on another test machine. is there an option "boot from file" in the boot manager's UI of the FW, when you interrupt the boot flow? if it is, try to run your executable this way, if it shows you path to it, of course, (it might, even not considering the drive bootable, actually, UEFI doesn't have such a notion). if it runs successfully, then the FW is picky on what part of the spec to support, if it fails, maybe you have some errors inside and FW deletes bad boot option.
does this machine have other storage devices? HDD? if you put it there, say \efi\glidix\myloader.efi?

~ · **Joined:** Tue Mar 06, 2007 11:17 am **Posts:** 1225

Probably your machine only has normal BIOS, or is in BIOS mode instead of UEFI mode.

I would prefer to have a regular BIOS computer and implement myself only the functions that make up what I need for UEFI to boot my code, to check that I'm understanding every detail of how it works.

Plus, it would make new software bootable in very old computers having a custom UEFI patch as a bootloader on top of the BIOS.

UEFI is like LILO or GRUB, or even like DPMI for 32/64 bits, so why not make my own in any case as part of my OS even if it's already present to port to more machines? They could probably be modified to implement a custom UEFI fast.

Octocontrabass · **Joined:** Mon Mar 25, 2013 7:01 pm **Posts:** 5144

64MB is awfully small. The firmware might expect a bigger partition than that. Microsoft recommends at least 100MB.

Have you tried letting some other OS create the EFI system partition and simply copying your binary to it?

Ethin · **Posted:** Wed Oct 30, 2019 7:08 pm

Not hard:

Code:

parted -s /dev/<device> mklabel gpt mkpart boot fat32 0% 100MB set 1 esp on

Or something like that. Then format it as fat32 and put your files in the proper places.

Ethin · **Posted:** Thu Oct 31, 2019 9:16 pm

mariuszp wrote:

Ethin wrote:

Not hard:

Code:

parted -s /dev/<device> mklabel gpt mkpart boot fat32 0% 100MB set 1 esp on

Or something like that. Then format it as fat32 and put your files in the proper places.

Do you know if it's somehow possible to also create another partition, with a custom type GUID? (to mark it as the Glidix FS).

I don't think parted supports that.

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UEFI "hello world" won't boot on physical hardware

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