Re: Broken Dell UEFI Firmware?

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

[ Note Reply-To set ]

Kent West wrote:
>
>I have a new Dell Precision 3620.
>
>I have just installed Jessie on the drive, in UEFI mode, creating a
>separate EFI partition, FAT-formatted, in a GPT partition table.
>
>After install, the "grubx64.efi" file is in in the "\[GUID]\EFI\debian"
>directory.

I'm unclear - is this what the installer set up during the
installation? There shouldn't be any GUIDs visible in the
filesystem...

>But when I boot the machine, it fails to boot, not being able to find a
>bootable device.
>
>When I go into the UEFI, I can manually specify a boot option to point to
>this directory, but when I reboot, it still fails. When I go back into the
>UEFI, and look at the boot option I specified, I see that the UEFI silently
>changed my specific "\[GUID\EFI\debian\grubx64.efi" entry to
>"\]GUID\BOOT\BOOTX64.efi".
>
>There seems to be no way to over-ride this silent bait-and-switch.

I've never seen a UEFI implementation where you can control access
like that way, to be honest. It looks like what you're seeing is the
standard way of describing the removable media path.

>I can boot from a rescue drive and create the "\BOOT" directory and copy
>the "grubx64.efi" file into it with the "BOOTX64.efi" name, and Debian
>boots fine, but I shouldn't have to do that, methinks.
>
>I downloaded/installed the most recent "BIOS" from the Dell site, to none
>effect.
>
>So, my question:
>
>Is Dell's UEFI implementation broken, or am I simply overlooking something?
>I'm going to go see if I can make the setting stick if I use
>Debian's efibootmgr utility.

Well, efibootmgr is how you'd normally manage the EFI boot
variables. Have you been trying to do this by hand for some reason?

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
< liw> everything I know about UK hotels I learned from "Fawlty Towers"