UEFI and BROKEN Parameter Issue : Ref. Fedora-31

[Bimal Kumar]

Dear Madam / Sir,

Just to intimate you about the issue I was facing while Fedora 31 / 32 installation.

 

I purchased a new Dell Laptop (Vostro-3580, i5, 8th Gen.) which has Windows-10 preinstalled, but I wanted to make it dual boot. The system was UEFI hence trying to dual Boot -  Fedora-31 and Windows-10.

For all my Earlier Dell laptops, and all versions of Fedora, I had a great and smooth experience of dual boot / single boot experience with the Legacy BIOS.

But now I purchased a new Dell-Vostro-3580, which has ONLY UEFI firmware to boot the laptop and this is the actual Problem, while another issue was that it gives me error and unable to boot into the rescue mode from the grub menu options.

I had installed Fedora-31 for almost 20 times (one time Fedora-32 also) including various options of remaking USB installation media through unetbootin/rufus etc. then also troubleshooting and reinstalling grub through rescue mode(using live usb pen drive) chroot... but all remains the temporary solutions.

This compelled me to read the installation of Fedora-31.... and I found this ....
"" Fedora does not support UEFI booting for 32-bit x86 systems. Only BIOS boot is supported on these systems.

Also note that Fedora only fully supports version 2.2 of the UEFI specification. Hardware that supports version 2.3 or later will boot and work normally, but the additional functionality defined by these later specifications will not be available. The UEFI specifications are available from https://www.uefi.org/specs/agreement/."" found at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/rawhide/install-guide/install/Booting_the_Installation/

The problem I was facing was UEFI does not remember the partition/location of the boot file of Fedora only, while the grub loads and very well boots into Windows-10 through the option from the grub menu and HANGS if I opt for Fedora-31 from the grub option menu.

Finally after a lot of experiments and reading I found that UPGRADE the UEFI firmware reading somewhere on the net and voila.. now all is fixed !!

Though it was very very UNFORTUNATE that Dell provided(on Dell website) the upgrade for this new(for me atleast) laptop with a UEFI version - 1.9 (11.03.2020). Just to mention that POOR RESPONSE from Dell Customer Service and NO EMAIL ID available to send email to them !!!

The other issue I found was the rescue mode is giving me ERROR, and to address it finally I found that the file rescue in /boot/loader/entry is missing the correct parameter, hence I appended "/boot" and it worked.

Just thought to share with you people in case if you could :

1) May also PROVIDE SUPPORT for older UEFI, or intimate Dell People(Worst People and POOREST CUSTOMER SUPPORT) to provide the latest UEFI firmware.

2) Correct the parameter setting for RESCUE boot. For your ready reference I am providing the content of the rescue file before and after the correction.

[root@localhost entries]# pwd
/boot/loader/entries

[root@localhost entries]# ls
4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d-0-rescue.conf  4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d-0-rescue.conf.ORG  4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d-5.3.7-301.fc31.x86_64.conf

[root@localhost entries]# cat 4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d-0-rescue.conf.ORG
title Fedora (0-rescue-4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d) 31 (Thirty One)
version 0-rescue-4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d
linux /vmlinuz-0-rescue-4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d
initrd /initramfs-0-rescue-4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d.img
options $kernelopts
grub_users $grub_users
grub_arg --unrestricted
grub_class kernel

[root@localhost entries]# cat 4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d-0-rescue.conf
title Fedora (0-rescue-4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d) 31 (Thirty One)
version 0-rescue-4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d
linux /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d
initrd /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-4c547532c2394079bb6f59b48cb1073d.img
options $kernelopts
grub_users $grub_users
grub_arg --unrestricted
grub_class kernel

regards,
Bimal Kumar