Trying to boot from a 4.1.1 installer usb stick, my HP EliteBook 845 G8 will not treat it as bootable. This laptop has no legacy support, just fully UEFI.
Am I out of luck here, or do I need to mess around with the usb files, as per:
You can’t swim if you don’t get into the water… (legacy support is … legacy).
Don’t be afraid to try, it’ll be rewarding, that’s for sure.
I’m currently booting Qubes R4.1.1 on a Intel Nuc without legacy support enabled.
The odd thing is that this usb stick boots just fine on my old 840 G5. Just refuses on my 845 G8. @thewanderer, so is your NUC in UEFI mode? And just for context, I’ve been installing Linux (Fedora) for decades (literally, since fc1) … usb on bare metal, usb iso in VirtualBox and VMWare. Never had a stick fail to boot like this.
Update: and I can boot a Fedora 36 installer usb in the new 845 G8, with zero issues.
So what is so different/special about the Qubes installer?
Correct. The 10th gen intel nuc supports legacy bios but in order to use it I have to disable Modern standby and octane mode for SATA. I haven’t bothered. It seems to work fine.
All systems do not have the same UEFI implementation, you can try and compare the boot configuration of fedora and qubes. Sometimes the firmware expects you to use efi/BOOT or something similar, and qubes uses efi/qubes, if there is a difference between qubes and fedora you can try and rename the files and directories to match and see if that works.
This is why legacy mode is the cure for many uefi problem, it solves a lot of the issues that are a result of the incomplete implementation in the firmware.
Right, but I’ve not come across “uefi problems” with usb sticks anywhere else, ever. So what is so special about the Qubes installer? Are we trying to something a bit left-field, and tripping ourselves up in the process?
Maybe it’s just the UEFI implementation in your hardware that is broken, Windows and Linux could have made special adjustments to accommodate it, and Qubes OS with a smaller developer team and community doesn’t have the same resources.
I’m guessing it’s something to do with the grub multiboot2 functionality for xen:
multiboot2 /images/pxeboot/xen.gz console=none
which looks pretty fundamental to how Qubes works, so not inclined to change it.
The documentation does have some troubleshooting you can try.
Yeah, been there, and lots of other similar pages.
So my behavior is: at the boot menu, I select the USB stick, system thinks about it for a second and then just gives me the menu screen again. Simple as that. No error, no clue. Again, on my older 840 G5, this step just works.
As this laptop is very new, only available this year (EliteBook 845 G8, AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 5650U), I’m inclined to think it’s doing something cutting-edge with UEFI, rather that it being broken.
So I’m going to switch laptops, get Qubes installed on the older one, and trusty Fedora 36 on the new one. Thanks for sticking with me on this.