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!
Have you tried to press Enter to show bios setup? (Don’t have one, but that’s what a quick search tell)
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.
Huh? Every ThinkPad I’ve had let’s me boot to a USB drive. Check your bios settings something is off, unless it’s through a company and they have it specifically disabled.
Not that one. Not from a company too. Maybe only using legacy only will solve this.
When asking help with your laptop, not providing your laptop’s model number is a great way to not get proper help.
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).
