UEFI and BROKEN Parameter Issue : Ref. Fedora-31

[Bimal Kumar]

Dear Madam / Sir,


Just to share about the issue I faced while Fedora 31 / 32 installation and
dual boot with Windows-10.



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...

The problem I faced, was UEFI (above laptop came with version 1.4) 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 someone could get benefitted
from my experiences :


1)Dell should have PROVIDED SUPPORT for older UEFI, or leagcy BIOS or Dell
People(Worst People and POOREST CUSTOMER SUPPORT) had provided the latest
UEFI firmware(latest is *Version 2.8*, and approved in March 2019 by UEFI).


2) Fedora people may correct the parameter setting for RESCUE boot. For
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