Booting Qubes from Internal SSD (ICYDOCK) on Multiple Devices No Longer Works

[barbour]

I have 4 identical PC’s on which I move my Qubes-installed SSD around between them. It has worked great until version 4.0.3.
With 4.0.4 I can only run Qubes on the PC on which I had the SSD during installation. Does the latest version of Qubes for security reasons check a serialnumber in the motherboard or CPU?

If so; can I deactivate that function?

[fsflover]

Which error are you getting when you’re trying to move the installation? Anything in the logs? I don’t think there is any such restriction in Qubes OS.

Also note that security of your Qubes installation may be compromised in case one of those 4 PCs has a compromised BIOS or compromised other drives.

[barbour]

At the startup of PC it stops at the BIOS settings. Not coming further.

[deeplow]

(Adjusted title for clarity; feel free to tweak it)

[barbour]

May the reason be that the latest version of Fedora (dom0) make this serial number check in motherboard/CPU? Like Windows 10.

[ludovic]

Hi @barbour ,
welcome to the Qubes OS Forum.

@barbour

At the startup of PC it stops at the BIOS settings. Not coming further.

Really no BIOS message? Or maybe, no UEFI boot entry for Qubes OS? Do you use UEFI? What is in your BIOS settings for the boot section?

If you got the “No bootable device” (or similar) BIOS message, look step #4 of this guide, with efibootmgr. Before using this command, please read its documentation, understand it and adjust the arguments to your case.

My use case: I cloned my SSD with clonezilla, changed it with the new clone, and got the unbootable message, the efibootmgr solved the issue.

Other related topics:

Cannot boot from SSD after installing a secondary Qubes to a USB disk

Yesterday, I had the same problem, except that the solution presented in the link here above (efibootmgr -v -c -L Qubes -l /EFI/qubes/xen.efi -d /dev/nvme0n1p1) did NOT work for me. Instead, I got something like: ************************************************** **** Warning! This MBR disk does not have a unique signature. If this is not the first disk found by EFI, you may not be able to boot from it without a unique signature. Run efibootmgr with the -w flag to write a unique signature …

Uefi bios entry gone after 2nd qubes install

So during a troubleshoot of kernel and crashes I ran a 2nd Qubes innstalation to a USB disk. After some testing I wanted to boot back to my main Qubes just to discover the boot entry was gone. Did some searches and found that this should resolve it for me: efibootmgr -v -c -L Qubes -l /EFI/qubes/xen.efi -d /dev/nvme0n1p1 (yup correct disk). That indeed gives me the entry, but if I choose it Im thrown right in to bios. Maybe the entry isnt correct for a 4.1 innstalation?

[qubes-users] Boot Menu disappeared after 2-nd Qubes installation. Need Help!

Hi everyone, need any help, because I am stuck. Today I got my External SSD and I installed the 2-nd Qubes OS on this Drive (the first one was been installed on my internal Laptop drive. But to my surprise, when I tried to load my first Qubes OS, I couldn’t. In BIOS my drive is visible like working device, but in Boot Menu it does not exist anymore. So like in Manual - https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/uefi-troubleshooting/#accessing-installer-rescue-mode-on-uefi I tried to go into the Rescue mod…

[unman]

No - and I am able to move disks between non identical machines
without issue.
Are you using UEFI or legacy boot?
What did you use on the install?
Have you tried installing on one of the other machines, and see if
that can be moved? If not, it would be interesting to see results.

[barbour]

Hi. Thanks for great advice. In the chapter before the suggested one, I found a solution:

UEFI Troubleshooting

Now it works good. I can shift the SSD between the PC’s.