Can't chainload past Fog menu (Boot hard drive) - HP zbook laptop

[Wayne Workman]

@szeraax In your information you posted, I see that Legacy Boot Options is enabled. Depending on how the system identifies when it requests a DHCP lease, fog may be telling it to use the BIOS exit type instead of the UEFI exit type. I’d recommend disabling legacy boot. If you don’t want to disable it, play around with the BIOS exit types this time, try sanboot and grub first, if those don’t work, try all the others one at a time.

Also - in all your tests, do a full power off, not a reboot.

[Szeraax]

Will begin doing full power off instead of the 3 finger salute.

[Wayne Workman]

@szeraax said in Can’t chainload past Fog menu (Boot hard drive) - HP zbook laptop:

Will begin doing full power off instead of the 3 finger salute.

Not familiar with what that is but OK.

[Tom Elliott]

@wayne-workman three finger salute = CTRL+ALT+DELETE usually. Or at least in olden days.

[Wayne Workman]

Ha! That is awesome!

[Szeraax]

@wayne-workman I’ve been through all options on legacy and EFI (change both to SANBOOT, both to exit, etc.) to no avail. Is there a debug way for me to see what exactly is failing? I wonder if it has to do with TPM or something? Or other? Iunno

[Szeraax]

I have had reFind boot the recovery partition with one of the options set… don’t recall which one. Think that has a chance of working?

[Sebastian Roth]

@Szeraax Sure, rEFInd is definitely a way to go if it works for your machine. With that there is a config to play with as well in /var/www/fog/service/ipxe/refind.conf

[Sebastian Roth]

Sounds a bit like rEFInd was not able to detect your main Windows partition. See what you can find out playing with the config and let us know.

[Szeraax]

@sebastian-roth I played with the internal, external, hdbios, etc. options. I do still need to play with getting it to exclude that recovery partition. Maybe that’ll work.

[Szeraax]

@sebastian-roth @Wayne-Workman Some other stuff I note:

1. In the host inventory, it has nothing listed for the Hard Disk Model/Firmware/Serial Number. Presumably because it is a NVMe hard drive? Can I do something to fix that?

2. I boot to the HP recovery partition by using the ReFind bios option: biosexternal. I then have the entry “Boot Legacy target SAMSUNG MZVLW256HEHP-000H1-S340NX1J727702”

From number two, I assume that since that is the ONLY option in the list besides About, shutdown, reboot, reboot to setup, that this biosexternal will not be a path to booting windows.

[Szeraax]

ReFind mentions using clover .efi for NVMe (if you search nvm a few times on this page: https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/drivers.html). What then would be the easiest way to add this .efi NVMe driver into the ReFind loader?

[Sebastian Roth]

@szeraax In the firmware settings you posted I found:

Legacy Boot Options
	Disable
	*Enable

Please try setting to disable. I think this is what I call the legacy BIOS compatibility mode or CSM. Be aware that your Windows has to be installed in UEFI mode to properly boot when you completely disable the legacy stuff. From my point of view you should definitely go that way as legacy stuff is just that legacy and will be gone at some point anyway. Go UEFI and do it right.

As well you mentioned TPM being enabled. Not sure if that might cause an issue as well. You don’t think it would but we had some Lenovo machines with some sort of extra security chip that wouldn’t even load iPXE properly if that was enabled.

And third, which version of FOG do you use? Most probably the rEFInd version we have in 1.4.4 and dev-branch can’t boot NVMe disks I think. So you might want to download the newer version we have in the working branch. Updated refind.efi and refind.conf you find here.

[Szeraax]

@sebastian-roth I have dev-branch. I can definitely try working.

[Szeraax]

@sebastian-roth Just dropping the updated rEFInd files (conf and efi) gave me the default ocnfig file again (obviously). And it seems that rEFInd still hangs at “rEFInd - Initializing…” when trying to scan internal. If I do just hdbois, it has no problem (other than no boot entries). I did disable legacy boot prior to testing latest rEFInd. I did confirm windows still starts fine after disabling Begacy Boot options. I did cold boot in order to test.

I guess my next step is to try moving to working branch. I think I would LOVE it if I could figure out how to load that NVMe driver .efi that I got from the clover EFI loader… ATM, i’m trying to edit an efi file and inject it directly. But I don’t have the knowhow, lol.

[Sebastian Roth]

@szeraax said in Can’t chainload past Fog menu (Boot hard drive) - HP zbook laptop:

I think I would LOVE it if I could figure out how to load that NVMe driver .efi that I got from the clover EFI loader… ATM, i’m trying to edit an efi file and inject it directly. But I don’t have the knowhow, lol.

Sorry, haven’t done that myself yet. I had a look at the Clover project but that seems to be just another universe. Too much for me right now. Keep us posted and I am sure we can jump in with some helpful suggestions from time to time.

[Szeraax]

@sebastian-roth Just to clarify, you think that other people are booting NVMe drives via rEFInd in working without needing to do extra stuff? If so, i’d LOVE to see what their config for refind.conf is… (I’d rather avoid trying to use clover too).

[Szeraax]

@sebastian-roth HOLY CRAP. Just dropping the clover boot.efi in the place of refind.efi booted windows just fine!

[george1421]

@szeraax Interesting!! Sebastian and I have been talking about this issue in the background. My focus was to see if we can get refind to boot via usb into a command shell then we can attempt to debug why its not finding your disk.

But that may not be necessary now. Maybe we need to research what is going on here. I know the easy solution would be to just provide another exit mode and that is where we may end up. But you are not the first to have this issue and refind “should” work. FOG may not be suppling the right info to refind to get it to locate your disks. Once I understand a bit more about refind’s innards, I hope we can ask you to help with your hardware to see if we can come up with a solution.

[Szeraax]

@george1421 Absolutely. Though, i’m told that we need to return this demo laptop cause it doesn’t have enough ram and is missing the 2nd HDD. So it may be a few weeks before I have another laptop of this same model (I probably will turn it in Thursday and can do any testing before then).