HP desktops/latops no Windows boot manager after imaging

[PeterL]

Hi,

we’ve got a few FOG deployments out there and we seem to have the same issues with HP hardware on all sites.

The first issue is with rEFInd not booting - I found a thread with a possible solution here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/14189/fog-1-5-7-uefi-refind-boot-to-win-10/3
I’ll have to try downgrading rEFInd like this user did and check if it will get going.

My main issue is that AFTER imaging the computers can’t seem to locate the Windows boot loader.
When manually selecting “Boot from file” and pointing to \EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi in the boot selection menu, the Windows installation boots normally.
Also there is no “Windows Boot Manager” entry in the UEFI boot options.

This most likely has nothing to do with FOG itself but with HPs BIOS/EFI implementation.
Same image on Lenovo/Dell hardware (and in the vmWare VM I’m building the image on) works as expected.

Does someone have tips on how to possibly work around this?

[PeterL]

I didn’t have time to test the rEFInd downgrade yet but found a workaround for the issue with the missing boot entry in the BIOS.

Rebuilding the BCD obviously solves the “problem” (which only HP BIOSes have).

Recovery process in short:

• Boot to recovery console
• Assign drive letter to EFI partition
• rename old BCD (\EFI\Microsoft\boot\BCD)
• bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-us /s [Assigned letter]: /f ALL

Still I’m wondering why this is an HP only issue.

Edit: I’m almost sure that “bcdboot C:\Windows /addlast” will also do it but currently do not have a victim to test upon.