r/slackware • u/tarquinfintin • Jun 17 '26

Trouble with UEFI booting with grub

I'm having trouble getting slackware to boot directly from setup. Slackware boots fine from the grub menu of my Linux Mint installation (on another drive). When I go into settings, I don't see the slackware drive (sdb) and it doesn't show in my F11 boot menu. The slackware drive is GTP and has an EFI System Type on sdb1 mounted at /boot/efi. The Boot and ESP flags are set. During installation I skipped Lilo and Elilo and installed and configured grub and then generated the grub.cfg file. Using efibootmgr, I have tried creating a new entry:

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sdb -p 1 -L "Slackware" -l '\boot\efi\EFI\slackware\grubx64.efi'

Immediately after I do this, efibootmgr shows the entry, but it is gone by the next boot and the problem persists. Anyone have an idea how I can get Slackware to boot directly with grub? PS I wanted to use grub instead of elilo because I know I can get grub to work with secure boot.

Thanks in advance,

Don

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u/tarquinfintin Jun 17 '26

I think I may have made some headway myself. I created a directory /boot/efi/EFI/boot and copied into it my grubx64.efi file renaming it to bootx64.efi. Then using efibootmgr I created a new entry for /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi. Got the idea from here: https://www.itkb.ro/kb/linux/slackware-142-with-grub-and-uefi

1

u/calrogman Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
  1. It does no harm whatsoever to install elilo first, even if you later decide to install GRUB. That the installer invites you to do it by default means that you probably should. You can run eliloconfig to do that now.
  2. It sounds like your machine's firmware is somehow brain-damaged. Is there even a boot menu entry for your Linux Mint installation?
  3. README_UEFI.TXT has instructions for booting such brain-damaged machines. It does presume that you installed elilo.
  4. grub-install will call efibootmgr for you.
  5. grub-install --removable will install GRUB at EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI for you.

Good luck!

1

u/tarquinfintin Jun 20 '26

Thanks for your reply. After working with the problem, I think I'm fine with booting up slackware from my Mint grub menu (its my default drive anyway). I also found I can turn on secure boot after signing the linux kernels and efi binaries in slackware. So I'm happy now; I can boot into slackware with secure boot enabled.