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!

  • @kugmo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6•2 years ago

    When asking help with your laptop, not providing your laptop’s model number is a great way to not get proper help.

    • @Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      3•2 years ago

      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

  • @horsemobile@sh.itjust.works
    4•2 years ago

    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.

  • @beirdobaggins@lemmy.world
    3•2 years ago

    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/

    • @Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      2•2 years ago

      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!

  • @darius@lemmy.ml
    3•2 years ago

    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).

    • @Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      1•2 years ago

      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!

    • @Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      2•2 years ago

      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.