My stupid Lenovo “Thinkpad” UEFI doesnt have a real F12 devices menu.
It just shows registered UEFI targets that can be booted.
This is pretty catastrophic, somehow I got Fedora and Windows installed, but thats it. If something breaks, I am in trouble. I cant do a memtest86 even though I think my RAM is faulty.
So in Linux, is there a way to add an UEFI entry to boot just any USB stick? Or to boot a specific one, like with Ventoy on it?
Thanks!
I’m a bit late here but when installing grub to a USB drive with a GPT/EFI compatible partitioning, you need to run the following command: “grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --removable” (without the quotes).
rEFInd can auto-detect bootable devices, and you can select them during startup. You need to install it to the efi partition as your boot manager.
With a simple config edit and file copy operation, I put a memtest86 efi image on my boot partition, and it shows up as an option for every boot. It’s nice to know I won’t have to fumble around with USB drives if I need to test my RAM in the future.
Thats awesome! But sounds pretty hacky… so I would remove grub and use refind instead?
Fedora Kinoite is built for Grub afaik, with the deployments and all. Not wanting to destroy that really…
I use Fedora Sericea, another Silverblue spin, on my laptop. It wasn’t hard to install rEFInd, and it coexists just fine with GRUB in my experience. rEFInd detects that grub is there and shows it as an option, like any other bootable media.
The rEFInd documentation at https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind is extensive, but the summary of how to install is
- Download the zip from https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html
- Extract it
- Launch the
refind-installscript. If needs to be run as root.
That was it for me, but the full installation steps are available at https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html if you run into trouble.
The next time I rebooted, rEFInd popped up and I was back in Fedora with no problem.
Have you tried to press Enter to show bios setup? (Don’t have one, but that’s what a quick search tell)
WTF, the BIOS doesn’t let you select the boot-order? Which Thinkpad is this?
Weird, suddenly, after like 20 tries, I can boot any media? Wtf?
Yes I could select the boot order but only for the UEFI entries (Fedora, Linux firmware updater, Windows Boot manager)
Not for plugged in devices. I never saw the name of my NVME for example, now suddenly its there?
I hate this proprietary garbage Bios so much, I cant wait to get a Clevo NV41MZ and flash dasharo on that, then try Heads.
Novacustom and 3mdeb do all the work. So if you want to support them, get a machine from them!
Did you enable CSM? By default you should never see a device to boot from and should only see valid UEFI targets.
It sounds like you got it working-ish.
One thing you might be running into is having hiberboot (AKA fast startup)enabled in windows. Instead of shutting down it hibernates when you choose “shutdown”.
If it is in the hibernated state instead of actually shutdown. You won’t be able to choose a different boot option.
Here is some info on how to turn it off. https://www.elevenforum.com/t/turn-on-or-off-fast-startup-in-windows-11.1212/
