swapping disk with UEFI hardware - a dead end?

[Peter Jones]

On 06/28/2012 09:25 AM, Peter Jones wrote:
> On 06/28/2012 09:11 AM, Kamil Paral wrote:
>> If you are knowledgeable about UEFI, I'll welcome your advice. This is the
>> issue I encountered:
>>
>> 1. I enabled UEFI mode in BIOS in Lenovo X220 (more exactly I set UEFI as the
>> preferred method).
>> 2. I installed Fedora 17.
>> 3. "Fedora" item appeared in BIOS in "Boot order" and also in the boot manager
>> if you hit F12 on device start-up.
>> 4. The Lenovo X220 machine had a broken audio connector, so I received a
>> replacement, exactly the same X220 machine (completely same hardware), just a
>> different piece.
>> 5. I enabled UEFI mode in BIOS in the new X220 machine.
>> 6. I swapped the disk from the old X220 machine to the new X220 machine.
>> 7. The new X220 machine pretended that the harddisk was not bootable. It
>> behaved exactly same as if the disk was blank. When I selected to boot from
>> HDD, it just skipped HDD and went to other boot methods (CD, network, etc). Of
>> course there was no longer any "Fedora" item in BIOS "Boot order" or the boot
>> manager on F12 key press.
>> 8. I had no idea how to fix that, how to force the new machine to boot my
>> Fedora, or how to "re-install" the UEFI item (e.g. similar to GRUB
>> re-installation). I had to re-install the whole system.
>>
>> My question obviously is:
>> a) Is this a hardware bug, or are UEFI machines supposed to work this way? Is
>> this the end of disk swapping between machines?
>> b) Is it possible to re-install the UEFI item somehow, e.g. using a LiveCD?
>
> This certainly appears that your newer x220 isn't set to boot in UEFI mode?

Having sent that mail it became obvious that what's happened is that your
new x220 board doesn't have the efi boot variable set.  Some machines allow
you to boot from a file, in which case it'll be /efi/fedora/grubx64.efi .
If your firmware doesn't have that, you'll need to boot some install/rescue
media to get to a shell. In either case you'll need to use efibootmgr to
add /efi/fedora/grubx64.efi to the boot order.

That's all assuming it's F17; if it's earlier, it'll be /efi/redhat/grub.efi .

-- 
         Peter