Problems with automatic boot on fresh installation HP 15S

User Support
1

Hi

tl;dr -I have a nearly successful installation of QubeS-OS 4.1 on a HP 15s laptop. However I have an issue with EFI/Grub which I don’t know how to resolve and which makes the booting process a bit convoluted. Basically. after installation I can boot the system manually if I go to my laptop boot menu and manually navigate to an EFI file. Looks like something is wrong either with my EFI or grub yet I can’t figure out what it is. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Target is a HP Laptop 15s with Amd Ryzen7 CPU. There’s no legacy boot option available. Secure boot is disabled.
Here’s what I’ve done during the installation:

1st installation on entire disk and automatic partitioning with LUKS encryption. The installer doesn’t complain about anything, after restart I get “No OS installed”. I reinstalled again in the ‘troubleshooting’ mode and before the restart I jumped into shell, mounted the boot and EFI partitions and copied efi files:
cp -r /mnt/sysroot/boot/efi/EFI/qubes/. /mnt/sysroot/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT

Then I restarted the system and was greeted with ‘no operating system installed’ again.
So I booted qubes USB wih rescue mode, provided luks passphrase and then it said ‘no linux installation found’. I hit enter and jump to shell.
I mounted /dev/nvme0n1p2 as /mnt/boot and /dev/nvme0n1p2 as /mnt/boot/efi and then then I run the following commands:

[root@dom0 ~]# efibootmgr -v -c -u -L QubeOS -l /EFI/qubes/grubx64.efi -d /dev/nvme0n1 -p 1
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0000
Boot0000* QubeOS	HD(1,GPT,8fd96567-a6c5-4dbf-923c-3ec4b59d161f,0x800,0x12c000)/File(\EFI\qubes\grubx64.efi)
[root@dom0 ~]# efibootmgr -v
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0000
Boot0000* QubeOS	HD(1,GPT,8fd96567-a6c5-4dbf-923c-3ec4b59d161f,0x800,0x12c000)/File(\EFI\qubes\grubx64.efi)
[root@dom0 ~]#

restarted and still ‘no operating system found’. Restarted the laptop again and went into laptop boot menu. All of a sudden I have new option available (and the only one) ‘boot from EFI file’. Once I hit enter I could navigate to /EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi and booted system!

However, after I boot the system and run efibootmgr from the dom0 shell, I get nothing :expressionless:

[root@dom0 ~]# efibootmgr -v
Timeout: 0 seconds
No BootOrder is set; firmware will attempt recovery

I have the same files in /boot/EFI/BOOT and /boot/EFI/qubes. It doesn’t matter which grubx64.efi file I choose, they both boot the system just fine.

So I can boot the system but each time I need to go to laptop boot menu, choose ‘boot from efi file’ navigate to grubx64.efi and hit enter. I’m then presented with grub menu and I can boot the system.
There’s no option in the bios menu to enable legacy mode either.

I there a way to fix this so that the system would boot ‘by itself’?

Thanks in advance!

2

After copying this, you should add uefi entry point to that new folder.

do this again, and i believe /mnt/boot/efi should be /dev/nvme0n1p1.

then rename grubx64.efi to bootx64.efi and grub.cfg to bootx64.cfg in /mnt/efi/EFI/BOOT folder.

lastly run create uefi entry :
efibootmgr -v -c -u -L "Qubes" -l /EFI/boot/bootx64.efi -d /dev/nvme0n1 -p 1

3

It worked! Thanks a lot!
For the record below is what I’ve done, maybe it will help someone else with similar problem.

Since I was able to boot the system manually off the hard drive, I’ve done the following from inside the Qubes dom0 terminal:

  1. inside /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT I renamed grubx64.efi to bootx64.efi and grub.cfg to bootx64.cfg

  2. run:
    efibootmgr -v -c -u -L "Qubes" -l /EFI/boot/bootx64.efi -d /dev/nvme0n1 -p 1

4

Not all laptop has this fallback feature so they can manually boot efi file and proceed to dom0, manually change in qubes rescue / other os is required.