Installing Gentoo on a ThinkPad X220

DRAFT! Installationdiary - Gentoo on a X220 DRAFT!

Model Specs

X220 - 4290-W1B

replaced internal HD with SSD Intel SSD 320 Series 120GB, 2.5", SATA II (SSDSA2CW120G310)

BIOS Update

Turns out to be very Linux unfriendly. There a ways to boot the .iso image with grub. I tried grub2 with help from syslinux memdisk, reached some kind of bios update menu. But got stuck there. After all I did it by installing Win7 and running the Windows BIOS update tool.

Boot from USB Stick

Sysresccd (2.2.0), which has a pretty nice script to create a bootable USB-Stick, failed to boot on the X220. Created an bootable usb stick from the gentoo-minimal.iso with unetbootin. Works.

Partition the Drive

parted

mklabel gpt

mkpart primary fat32 1 201

set 1 boot on

mkpart primary linux-swap 202 4047

mkpart pimrary ext2 4048 120GB

Gentoo stage3

Grub-1.99 from scarabeus overlay is needed. Fix the STRIP_MASK error, remove last "a". Enable GRUB_PLATFORMS=efi-64 in make.conf.

grub2-install --boot-directory=/boot/efi/efi --bootloader-id=grub --no-floppy --recheck /dev/sda

grub-mkimage -d /lib/grub/x86_64-efi -O x86_64-efi -p "" -o /boot/efi/efi/grub/grub2.efi <Your_List_of_GRUB2_Modules>

cp /boot/efi/efi/grub/grub2.efi /boot/efi/efi/boot/bootx64.efi