Handbook Talk:AMD64/Installation/Bootloader

Grub2 all platforms
It should be made very clear that the boot partition should be mounted prior to using the grub2-install command. Without mounting the boot partition, grub2-install will say it has installed successfully with no error, leaving you with a non-bootable system.


 * Pickledpiper, Please remember to sign your comments on discussion pages. :) I will look into your concern. If a note is necessary, then I will add one. :) --Maffblaster (talk) 17:39, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Grub UEFI instructions needed
New to wiki and gentoo, so sorry if this is the wrong place/I format this comment wrong.

In any case, the grub instructions should either link to https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB2#UEFI_with_GPT or talk about how you have to emerge with GRUB_PLATFORMS="efi-32 efi-64" (one of those two) and possibly use --target x86_64_efi. This took me much too long to figure out as a noob.

Mordocai (talk) 07:39, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Grub2 install UEFI fails from minimal CD
When using UEFI: grub2-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot

Note: this step fails when running from a minimal CD booted in BIOS (legacy) mode. This is because the efivars module is not available there. See for example

A fix for this is to install from a Gentoo Hybrid ISO (LiveDVD) booted through UEFI.

syslinux should be proposed here
Why syslinux has never be proposed as bootloader for Gentoo Linux? It is a mature, versatile, complete and lightweight bootloader. Also, it respect the KISS principle.

There are reason to exclude it?

Incomplete umount on recent kernels
Recent kernels mount some "cgroup" stuff within the chroot in /mnt/gentoo, which causes the final umount to fail due to the mounted sub paths. I'd suggest to replace cdimage ~#umount /mnt/gentoo{/boot,/sys,/proc,} with cdimage ~#umount -R /mnt/gentoo which recursively umounts everything mounted in /mnt/gentoo.