So after having to get one laptop to boot on UEFI I got to make the Latitude work with that as well, if anything, as a point of pride. Last time I was able to get Windows booting as UEFI but I ended up using GRUB 2 with the legacy BIOS booting instead of UEFI for Linux, and promisd myself to find a way to set this up before.
Well, after the comments on my previous post I made sure to update my copy of SysRescueCD, as I only had a version 2.x on my USB key the other day, and that does not support EFI booting — but the new version (3.0) actually supports it out of the box, which makes it much easier, as I no longer need the EFI shell to boot an EFI stub kernel. To be precise, there also no need to use EFI stub, if not to help in recovery situations.
So, after booting into SysRescueCD, I zeroed out the Master Boot Record (to remove the old-style GRUB setup), re-typed the first partition to EF00 — it was set to EF02 which is what GRUB2 uses to install its modules on non-EFI systems), and formatted it to vfat, then… I chrooted into the second partition (which is my Gentoo Linux’s root partition), rebuilt GRUB2 to support efi-64, and just used grub2-install. Done!
Yes, the new SysRescueCD makes it absolutely piece of cake. And now I actually disabled the non-UEFI booting of that laptop and, not sure if it’s just my impression, though, it feels like it’s actually a second or two faster.
Still on the UEFI topic, turns out that Fabio ordered the same laptop I got (and I’m writing from right now), which means that soon Sabayon will have to support UEFI booting. On the other hand, I got Gentoo working fine on this laptop and the battery life is great, s I’m not complaining about it too much. I’ll actually write something about the laptop and how it feels soon, but tonight, I’m just too tired for it.