1y ago

How do I add UEFI entries to boot any USB device?

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!

44 comments

You can look into using efibootmgr to create UEFI boot entries

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-install script. 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.
  
  You can also chain rEFInd to GRUB if you don't want to mess with that.

Don't you have an option to boot from usb in the BIOS?
Note that accessing the boot menus is not always with F12. Sometimes it's also ESC, F1, F2 or DEL. You should try those.
- or F11
  
  I've had F10 before too.
- Its the boot menu for sure.
  Maybe I need to set "legacy first" to boot from USB?
  There is no "boot from USB" in the BIOS and the F12 menu doesnt show devices, just UEFI entries.
  
  The BIOS should have a boot order option. You could set you USB as first priority there. Your USB may need to be plugged in to appear in this list.
  
  Try F1 instead of F12. It should be under Setup -> Boot, and then just make your USB the first entry, save, and exit. And just so we're covering all bases, the usb should be plugged in before you reboot into the bios settings and it may be under a name that doesn't say "usb" anywhere (for example, the name of my usb in the bios settings contains the manufacturer and size in GB in addition to some other nonsense that i think is a model number).

I had to enable "USB hard drives" in the regular bios setup to get access to them in the F12 menu (Thinkpad L480). Not in front of me at the moment but on the "boot" or startup page there was a sort of unintuitive to find "boot" menu that looked like a page header that lets you enable or disable boot devices. USB was disabled by default.

When asking help with your laptop, not providing your laptop's model number is a great way to not get proper help.
- True. Its a Thinkpad T495
  But what I meant is that I am pretty sure there is no secret setting, but that I simply need to fix it otherwise, like with rEFInd or something like that

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.
  
  What model?

Maybe try easy2boot.
https://easy2boot.xyz/download/

Have you tried to press Enter to show bios setup? (Don't have one, but that's what a quick search tell)
- Have to check

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.
  
  Never heard of the Clevo before, thanks
  
  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/
- No that is off, I really have no problems with Windows not shutting down.
  But now I actually have an UEFI+legacy boot menu, listing my entries AND drives!

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).
- Do you know if any flashing tool does this automatically? Etcher? Fedora media writer? Because they always override everything.
  Kde iso image writer doesnt seem to do this, but this might be the fix!

If you have UEFI enabled, probably you also have secure boot. I did a script to create a usb pendrive that works with UEFI and Secure Boot, you can boot a liveusb Debian, Ubuntu or clonezilla at the moment
https://github.com/kabutor/liveusb
Edit: but I don't think you can run memtestx86, last time I checked don't have uefi support

44 comments